In November we
announced a partnership with Salesforce, including a plan to build new integrations between Google Analytics 360, Salesforce Sales Cloud and Salesforce Marketing Cloud, seamlessly connecting sales, marketing and advertising data for the first time.
Today we're introducing the first of these integrations: sales pipeline data from Sales Cloud (e.g. leads, opportunities) can now be imported directly into Analytics 360, so any marketer in a business that manages leads can see a more complete view of the customer’s path to conversion and quickly take action to engage them at the right moment. Enterprises such as Rackspace and Carbonite are already benefiting from this integration, saving hours piecing together data and reaching new, more valuable audiences.
A complete view of the customer journey
We often hear from marketers how difficult it is to connect online and offline customer interactions in order to see a complete view of a customer’s journey — and they also tell us how helpful it would be if they could do it successfully. Good news: with the
turnkey integration between Sales Cloud and Analytics 360, marketers can now easily combine offline sales data with their digital analytics data so they can see a complete view of the conversion funnel.
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.
Example of a report in Google Analytics 360 showing the relationship between the traffic source for online leads and the progression of those leads through the sales pipeline, as tracked in Salesforce
With the built-in connection between Analytics 360 and
BigQuery, Google Cloud's enterprise data warehouse, marketers can also easily move Sales Cloud data from Analytics 360 into Google Cloud to join it with other datasets and unlock BigQuery's powerful set of tools for identifying insights.
Better marketing outcomes
More visibility into the customer journey is great — but the real value comes from being able to take action. For example, if one source of site traffic consistently delivers leads that are higher quality than another source, budget can be shifted to drive more of the better traffic.
The built-in connections between Analytics 360 and Google’s media buying platforms offer additional ways to find new customers and drive incremental revenue. Marketers can use the tools in AdWords and DoubleClick Search to optimize their bidding on search ads based on the goal of actual sales (offline conversions tracked in Salesforce) rather than just basic website leads. Or they can create an audience list in Analytics 360 of qualified leads from Sales Cloud and use AdWords or DoubleClick Bid Manager so their display ads reach people with similar characteristics.
“People are doing backflips over this”
Rackspace® is a provider of managed cloud services that relies heavily on digital marketing channels to capture interest from potential customers and drive new business. Rackspace has been beta testing the Sales Cloud to Analytics 360 integration and the team has already seen significant benefits from connecting their sales pipeline reporting to their digital marketing analytics.
“Being able to easily see our sales pipeline data in Google Analytics and get complete funnel reports with no manual work has been a game changer. We’re now able to quickly diagnose changes in lead volume and quality, and trace them back to our marketing investments in a way that was not possible before.
We’re getting better insights into our marketing performance and getting those insights much more quickly than when we were trying to stitch this together manually — saving 8-10 hours each week and reducing the lag from importing offline conversion data from 4-6 weeks to virtually real-time. People are doing backflips over this!” - Lara Indrikovs, Senior Manager, Digital Insights & Analytics
Carbonite offers cloud data back-up services that help protect personal and business data from data loss. Carbonite has also been beta testing the Sales Cloud integration and is gearing up to change their media activation strategy to take advantage of the new insights that are now available to them.
“We’re really excited about the opportunity to leverage Salesforce data in Google Analytics and our AdWords media campaigns. This will allow us to activate pipeline acceleration and lookalike prospecting campaigns based on the profiles of companies that achieved key milestones in our customer lifecycle after becoming a lead. We expect this new approach will improve our ROI by shifting our targeting capabilities towards more valuable leads and opportunities.” - Norman Guadagno, SVP of Marketing
What's next?
Over the next few months we’ll be making additional Sales Cloud data available in Analytics 360, giving marketers even more intelligence. For example:
- Product-specific data will make it possible to run remarketing campaigns that present cross-sell or up-sell offers to customers based on products previously ordered
- Data predicting the likelihood of lead conversion will let marketers create audience lists of prospects who have a high likelihood of purchasing, which can be used for remarketing (to move people along the sales funnel) or prospecting
- Lifetime value data can be used as a diagnostic tool to provide insight into which marketing channel brings in the highest value customers
As 2018 moves on, we'll continue to roll out more of the Salesforce-Analytics 360 integrations announced back in November. Soon marketers will be able to include conversion data from Sales Cloud in Google Attribution 360 for more accurate data-driven attribution modeling, surface data from Analytics 360 in Marketing Cloud for a more complete understanding of campaign performance, and make audiences created in Analytics 360 available in Marketing Cloud for activation via direct marketing channels like email.
Contact us
here if you are not yet using Analytics 360 and would like to learn more. Current customers can talk to your account team or Certified Analytics Partner about developing a plan for implementing these integrations.
Stay tuned, it's going to be a big year!
Kyle Harrison, Group Product Manager, Google Analytics
