Ever wanted to know how well you truly know your customers?
Salesforce, the world’s leading CRM software and cloud computing company, recently announced it has partnered with Google. Through an integration that enables sales, marketing and advertising data to flow between Google Analytics 360 Suite and Salesforce’s Marketing and Sales Clouds, marketers can now focus on achieving the holy grail in measurement and drive enhanced data driven advertising strategies. Google Analytics processes billions of customer moments, Salesforce Marketing Cloud sends billions of emails and creates millions of sales leads so why did they wait for so long you may ask!
As an industry, we have struggled to piece together online and offline customer interactions and build a single and complete view of a customer’s journey. All too often, we have to rely on third party companies such as Nielson, Datalogix in order to do this.
Salesforce and Google’s partnership now helps to bridge this gap between offline and online marketing and sales channels such as digital advertising, email, call center and sales teams to better establish an understanding of each channels contribution within the marketing mix.
The integration between the two behemoth technologies is a positive development for the entire digital advertising ecosystem. Our experience of working with a range of advertisers has shown that marketers were joint customers of both technology stacks but connecting them was achievable, thus they never were able to close the bridge.
What this means in practice is that it is now possible to track leads and ad spend returns across all channels and as such get a more accurate measurement of overall ROI for all marketing. The insights made possible by this integration are a further nail in the coffin of the last click attribution model, which has been used for many years to evaluate digital channel performance.
It is still very early days on this partnership and as such there’s still much to understand in terms of the real possibilities available when the connection is rolled out in the first half of 2018, however one example we have tried to illustrate could be for an airline operator:
Objective: To find new customers to grow sales
- Create an audience in Analytics 360 of qualified leads from Sales Cloud and use AdWords or DoubleClick Bid Manager to reach people with similar characteristics.
- Create a goal in Analytics 360 based on leads marked as closed in Sales Cloud, and automatically send that goal to AdWords or DoubleClick Search to optimize your bidding and drive more conversions.
As Google and Salesforce rollout the integration we recommend that together with your media, data and creative agency teams, to build a library of easy, medium and hard use cases and a new measurement framework to showcase the marketing effectiveness and insights the partnership can bring to your organisation.
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