This week, Google & Salesforce announced turnkey integrations between Google Analytics 360 and Salesforce Sales Cloud and Salesforce Marketing Cloud, along with integrations with G Suite and the Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
- Sales data from Sales Cloud will be available in Analytics 360 for use in attribution, bid optimization and audience creation
- Data from Analytics 360 will be visible in the Marketing Cloud reporting UI for a more complete understanding of campaign performance
- Audiences created in Analytics 360 will be available in Marketing Cloud for activation via direct marketing channels, including email and SMS
- Customer interactions from Marketing Cloud will be available in Analytics 360 for use in creating audience lists
In a nutshell, here’s what is significant about this announcement:
Google Analytics 360 is more enterprise than ever
This integration deepens Google Analytics 360’s place in the enterprise and demonstrates a clear intent to compete for and win the business of the world’s leading brands.
It’s a 1st for 3rd party integrations
The demand for CRM and analytics data to be used in tandem for bigger business benefits is strong. Cardinal Path has been helping clients to combine their Salesforce and Google Analytics data for many years now, and this will likely bring a myriad of new benefits with its seamless integration.
An official third party integration is a first for Google Analytics, which historically, has not provided integrations with other marketing platform vendors. This partnership between two marketing behemoths seems like a great fit – augmenting each other’s solutions, not competing, in ways that will drive significant value for businesses that use these two platforms.
Opens the door for more opportunities
This partnership and product integration enables the ability to provide even more tailored and personalized experiences. Use your CRM data to help create more personalized experiences with your media and on your digital properties, providing a more complete digital experience. And continue that experience when prospects and customers engage with you offline with information available through the Salesforce CRM.
As we look down the road, this opens other exciting possibilities as well. Could we see audience data from Salesforce and Google Analytics 360 being pushed into the Salesforce DMP (formerly Krux, before Salesforce acquired them earlier this year) or vice versa? At Cardinal Path, we are super excited about what this partnership means for our clients and how they engage with their customers.
Closes the loop on acquisition and messaging
This partnership continues to narrow the gaps in Google’s offering to marketers, with content management being one of the few that remain. Salesforce has been wading into these waters more recently with Commerce Cloud and it will be great to watch as these two enterprises continue to expand their partnership.
While there’s no official launch date, features of this newly minted partnership should start to roll out in the first half of 2018 and are going to be provided at no additional cost. And like we’ve seen across the industry, this trend toward acquisitions, partnerships and consolidations in the digital sphere will continue. The winners are the enterprise clients who, with fewer choices and more robust platforms delivering on the promise of digital data, are getting more bang for their buck and the comfort of a slightly more simplified MarTech landscape.
- Google’s official announcement on the Analytics blog
- Salesforce’s Google partnership promotion page
- Salesforce’s press release and keynote announcement (Google is at 57 minutes)
Google Analytics 360 Resources
If you’d like to learn more about Google Analytics 360 Suite, check out the webinar series co-produced by Cardinal Path and Google that drills down into each feature area of the platform.
