Salesforce + Google Analytics 360: Getting a Granular View of the Customer Journey

Since Salesforce doesn’t come equipped with out-of-the-box analytics functionality, the Integration of Salesforce Sales and Marketing Clouds with Google Analytics 360 seems to have drastically changed the game in this regard. The nice thing about it is that this integration allows marketers to drastically cut down manual work – marketing activities that used to take a lot of time previously, have now become automated. Marketers do not have to manually upload, piece together and activate data from Analytics 360 for hours any longer, which frees up time for gaining more valuable insights and a deeper understanding of the customer journey and experience.

How It Works

The connection between the two flagship marketing solutions allows sales, marketing and advertising data to move smoothly between Google Analytics 360 suite and Salesforce Marketing and Sales Clouds. Data communication between both Clouds and GA happens in four ways:

1. The integration lets you upload sales pipeline data from Sales Cloud directly into Google Analytics 360, the data being automatically imported from your Salesforce Account to Google Analytics at regular intervals.
2. Data from Analytics 360 become visible in the Marketing Cloud reporting UI, which allows getting a real-time understanding of how your marketing campaigns perform.
3. Audiences created in Analytics 360 are imported to Marketing Cloud to be targeted via direct marketing channels.
4. Customer interactions from Marketing Cloud are exported into Analytics 360 to be used in creating audience lists.

Opportunities

Marc Benioff, Chairman and CEO of Salesforce, said: “Our partnership with Google represents the best of both worlds for our customers. There has never been an easier way for companies to run their entire business in the cloud—from productivity apps, email and analytics, to sales, service and marketing apps, this partnership will help make our customers smarter and more productive.”

The immense value the integration is supposed to bring to your business can’t be overestimated. In broad lines, it is intended to provide businesses with in-depth insights into how customers respond to their marketing efforts – simply put, which efforts are working and which seem to have fallen flat. For example, once you’ve sent a promotional email to your customers, you’ll be able to see in Marketing Cloud how many pages they browsed through on your website, how many times they clicked on product details, and how many visitors purchased a product.

So, what are those unique opportunities the turnkey integration is set to deliver?

• Getting a granular view of the customer journey

Owing to the solution, businesses can get a clear vision of the entire customer journey – from online research to conversion. This allows marketers to use Analytics to track leads as they are moving through the sales pipeline, and thereby take actions right away to engage leads with relevant campaigns at the most opportune time to boost the chance for closing a sale. Thus, you can deliver personalized customer experience through Google Optimize 360 based on where they are in the purchase funnel.

• Bridging the gap between offline and online sales data

The integration opens up an unmatched opportunity to get a more complete view of the conversion process in that it enables to supplement digital sales data with offline sales data. You can then analyze your offline conversions that come from online research and ad clicks in real time, all without joining offline and online data manually.

• Focusing on the most high-performing traffic channel

Now you are able to monitor your marketing performance across all online traffic channels to figure out how effective your marketing efforts are in generating and converting leads and understand ROAS of paid traffic channels. Furthermore, by means of Google Analytics Custom Report you can gain insights into how the traffic source for online leads factors into the quality of leads coming from each of these channels. Said differently, how each of your channels impact the final conversion of your leads. That way, marketers can reallocate budget from one channel into another that drives the highest value leads and converted sales.

• Propelling growth

The integration of Sales Cloud data into GA 360 will allow marketers to expand their customer reach and drive more conversions by means of creating customized Audience lists in Analytics 360. Afterwards, they can push these Audiences to Google advertising platforms such as AdWords and DoubleClick and target them with optimized ads in order to reengage customers, convert prospects into buyers or reach more people with characteristics similar to those of your converted leads.

Takeaway Message

Though the GA360 + Salesforce integration hasn’t been around that long, still it holds big promise for the future in that it opens up unparalleled opportunities to get instant access to valuable analytics data, and thereby revolutionize your marketing campaigns and optimize customer journeys in real time.