The partnership formed by Google (NASDAQ: GOOGL) and Salesforce (NYSE: CRM) in November of 2017 has resulted in the first of many integrations. This particular one can import data directly into Google Analytics 360 from Salesforce’s Sales Cloud.
For marketers managing leads, this change will offer a comprehensive view of the customer journey to conversion. With this information, businesses and sales reps can take action at the right time and quickly engage customers to increase their chances for closing the deal and retaining their business.
The collaboration between these two companies is creating solutions to connect sales, marketing and advertising data and provide a top down view of what is working across your ads, websites, emails and call centers — and what is not.
On the official Google Analytics Solutions blog, Kyle Harrison, Group Product Manager at Google Analytics writes, “This opens up new ways to understand how customers engage with brands and how marketing programs perform. For example, marketers can explore the relationship between the traffic source for online leads (e.g. organic search vs. paid search vs. email) and the quality of those leads, as measured by how they progress through the sales pipeline.”
Benefits of the Sales Cloud Integration With Analytics 360
Rackspace and Carbonite are two companies already benefiting from the integration by reaching new, more valuable audiences and saving hours piecing together different data points.
This is achieved by having access to a complete view of the customer journey, conversion funnel and combining offline sales data with digital analytics. This includes the relationship between the traffic source for online leads and the progression of those leads through the sales pipeline.
Google Cloud’s enterprise data warehouse, BigQuery, has a built-in connection with Analytics 360 so other datasets can be unlocked using the BigQuery tools for identifying insights.
Using the visibility gained into the customer journey, businesses can gain better marketing outcomes by identifying sources that deliver high quality leads over others. Resources can then be targeted to invest more in what is delivering or driving more traffic.
Instead of using basic website leads, marketers can use tools in AdWords and DoubleClick Search to optimize bidding on search ads based on the goal of actual sales, such as offline conversions tracked in Salesforce. Lists of audiences can also be created with the goal of having display ads reach people with similar characteristics.
More Integrations
Google said there will be more integrations with Salesforce over the next few months. This includes making product specific data from Sales Cloud available, along with data predicting and using lifetime value as a diagnostic tool with the goal of giving marketers even more intelligence.
Later in 2018, marketers will have additional tools at their disposal. Conversion data from Sales Cloud in Google Attribution 360 will give them more accurate data-driven attribution modeling and they will have a comprehensive understanding of campaign performance using surface data from Analytics 360 in Marketing Cloud.
Image: Google Analytics
