Salesforce announces data integrations with Google Analytics 360

To help customers gain more insights into their marketing campaigns’ impact on the customer journey, Salesforce and Google have announced an arrangement to integrate CRM data with digital analytics and ad campaign data.

The integration with Google’s premium analytics platform, Google Analytics 360, is part of a larger strategic partnership with Google that was announced at Salesforce’s annual customer conference, Dreamforce, in San Francisco on Monday.

The analytics piece aims to bridge the gaps between offline and online customer touch point data across any number of channels — digital advertising, email, call center, sales teams and so on — to better understand which efforts are working and which are lagging behind.

Google Analytics 360, Salesforce Sales Cloud and Salesforce Marketing Cloud will now connect in four ways:

• Sales data from Sales Cloud will be available in Analytics 360 for use in attribution, bid optimization and audience creation.
• Data from Analytics 360 will be visible in the Marketing Cloud reporting UI for a more complete understanding of campaign performance.
• Audiences created in Analytics 360 will be available in Marketing Cloud for activation via direct marketing channels, including email and SMS.
• Customer interactions from Marketing Cloud will be available in Analytics 360 for use in creating audience lists.

With the connection of Google Analytics 360 and Sales Cloud, Google Attribution 360 users will be able to include offline conversions in attribution modeling. Advertisers will be be able to combine Salesforce data (such as sales milestones or conversions) with behavioral data from your digital properties to create richer audiences and for smarter bidding.

From the announcement:

For example, if you’re a residential solar panel company and want to find new customers, you can create an audience in Analytics 360 of qualified leads from Sales Cloud and use AdWords or DoubleClick Bid Manager to reach people with similar characteristics. Or, create a goal in Analytics 360 based on leads marked as closed in Sales Cloud, and automatically send that goal to AdWords or DoubleClick Search to optimize your bidding and drive more conversions.

The integrations are expected to roll out in the first half of 2018.

Example of a customer journey funnel in Google Analytics 360 with website data (pageviews, leads submitted) and pipeline data from Sales Cloud (lead and opportunity stages). Users will be prompted to create a new audience segment.

About The Author

Ginny Marvin

Ginny Marvin was formerly Third Door Media’s Editor-in-Chief, running the day-to-day editorial operations across all publications and overseeing paid media coverage. Ginny Marvin writes about paid digital advertising and analytics news and trends for Search Engine Land, Marketing Land and MarTech Today. With more than 15 years of marketing experience, Ginny has held both in-house and agency management positions. She can be found on Twitter as @ginnymarvin.