Google-Salesforce partnership | Resolution Digital Australia

Google and Salesforce have recently announced a partnership that will result in integrations between Google Analytics 360, Salesforce Sales Cloud (SFSC) and Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC).

Google and Salesforce have recently announced a partnership that will result in integrations between:

Google Analytics 360
Salesforce Sales Cloud (SFSC)
Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC)

The partnership aims to deliver a complete view of the consumer journey from awareness to offline conversion. This will help businesses gain more insights on the impact of their marketing activities on consumer journey, including a full understanding of what is working and what isn’t, and the ability to engage consumers at the right moment.

How it works

The integrations are expected to arrive in the first half of 2018 and will connect Google Analytics 360, SFSC and SFMC in the following four ways:

Sales data from Sales Cloud will be available in Analytics 360 for use in attribution, bid optimisation and audience creation
Data from Analytics 360 will be visible in the Marketing Cloud reporting UI for a 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 to create audience lists

Resolution POV

This partnership presents a potential way through the “walled gardens” of Google and Facebook, giving marketers the ability to use the same audience lists across both search (via AdWords), programmatic (via DoubleClick Bid Manager) and paid social (via Facebook).

A key consideration that both clients and agencies should be monitoring are audience match rates from the integrations, as well as the quality of the audiences targeted by benchmarking conversion metrics against existing audience remarketing practices.

A bit more detail on the benefits for clients who use Analytics 360, Sales Cloud and Marketing Cloud together:

This will bridge the gaps between online activity and offline interactions, allowing marketers to identify and better understand which touchpoints contributed to offline conversion and optimise digital marketing activities accordingly.
With sales data available for use in Analytics 360, Google Attribution 360 users will be able to include offline conversions in attribution modelling. By combining Salesforce data with behavioural, we will be able to create richer audience segments for further targeting and campaign optimisation in AdWords or DoubleClick. For example, we could identify a group of customers who have recently visited a website and have a historic spend in physical/online stores for further targeting through digital campaigns to increase ROI. Similarly, we could reach users that have similar characteristics to existing high-profit customers.

Below is an example of a customer journey funnel in Analytics 360 with website data (pageviews, leads submitted) and pipeline data from Sales Cloud (lead and opportunity stages) with an option to create a new audience segment.

Analytics 360 custom-built audiences will be available for seamless integration into Marketing Cloud to be used for timely and relevant activations across direct marketing channels. For instance, a client could create an audience of customers who have recently bought a product and promote aftersales service via email.

Our recommendations for marketers

Use Google Analytics Attribution Modelling to analyse conversion path and to determine the value of marketing channels that lead to an online/offline conversion.
Create audiences and goals, and import them to AdWords and/or DoubleClick for retargeting and optimisation purposes.
Built custom audiences to further reach consumers through direct marketing with the relevant messaging based on their needs.
Once the integrations are in place, different digital marketing activities will be available for optimisation based on deeper insights and understanding of customers.
If your client is using other CRMs it is still possible to do a lot of the above it just takes a bit more effort and we have successfully been rolling this out with clients.