Redefining the future of Marketing – Salesforce Marketing Cloud Integration with Google Analytics 360

Know your customers better and make smarter, insight-based marketing decisions through Salesforce’s massive customer relationship management platform twinned with Google Analytics 360’s market-leading digital analytics solution designed to drive superior growth across marketing, commerce, and service. This is what Salesforce marketing cloud integration with Google plans to accomplish.

Consumers want personalized experiences, and Customer Experience (CX) has become a core differentiator for many successful business models. According to the Salesforce state of a connected customer report, 80% of consumers say that the experience a company provides is as important as its products or services, and a staggering 57% have stopped buying from a company because a competitor provided a better experience. However, marketers still face the challenge of merging together online and offline customer interactions to get the complete view of a customer journey to deliver consistent customer experiences. In an effort to help marketers overcome this challenge, Salesforce along with Google has announced Salesforce Marketing Cloud integration with Google Analytics 360 that allows marketers to get a complete view of what is working and what isn’t as customers engage with ads, websites, apps, emails, call centers, field sales teams and more. Here’s a quick rundown of the Google – Salesforce integration designed for a better understanding of customer journeys and smarter marketing decisions.

What the Salesforce Marketing Cloud integration with Google means to the Marketers 

Previously, viewing Google Analytics data alongside email metrics was doable, but it was a cumbersome process that required the user to handle multiple interfaces. Marketers had to use consistent campaign tracking parameters, export data from different systems, and then merge them together in a reporting suite. However, with the new connection between Salesforce and Google Analytics 360, marketers will gain a better understanding of how their marketing campaigns perform.

For instance, if a marketer sends an email campaign to loyal customers to promote their Spring sale, the marketer can see right in Salesforce Marketing Cloud, information like how many pages people visited when they visited the website, the number of times people clicked on product details and how many people actually added items to their shopping cart and converted. According to Google, GA 360, Salesforce Sales Cloud and Salesforce Marketing Cloud will now connect in four ways –

• Sales data from Salesforce Sales Cloud will be available in GA 360 for use in attribution, bid optimization, and audience creation
• Data from GA 360 will be visible in the Salesforce Marketing Cloud reporting UI for a better understanding of campaign performance
• Audiences created in Google Analytics 360 will be available in Marketing Cloud for activation through direct marketing channels like email and SMS
• Customer interactions from Salesforce Marketing Cloud will be available in Google Analytics 360 for use in creating audience lists

Representation of a complete customer journey funnels joining website data (pageviews, leads submitted) with pipeline data from Salesforce Sales Cloud (lead and opportunity stages). The representation also shows a prompt to create a new audience segment to take action.

Source: Google Marketing Platform

Here’s how to configure Salesforce Marketing Cloud Integration for GA 360

Follow these steps on Salesforce documentation to set up the Salesforce Marketing Cloud integration with your GA 360 account.

• Link Google Analytics 360 and Marketing Cloud Accounts
• Configure Google Analytics Accounts, Properties, and Views
• Configure Google Analytics 360 Tracking Parameters
• Configure Google Analytics 360 Integration User Permission

Leveraging customer data to reach the right person at the right time is one of the most critical elements of a marketing strategy. With Google Analytics 360 and Salesforce integration, you can access meaningful customer data on their end to end journey, which will enable you to optimize your marketing campaigns for better engagement and ROI.