Salesforce and Google Will Pool Data to Provide Souped-Up Personalized Marketing

Salesforce Marketing Cloud is hooking up with Google Analytics. The two companies are integrating their data together so that advertisers have access to both companies’ pools of stats when running campaigns. The companies announced the deal at Salesforce’s annual Dreamforce conference, which kicks off today in San Francisco. In theory, Salesforce customers will gain access to Google’s trove of data about what websites and searches consumers look, which can then be used to fine-tune email, push notification and SMS campaigns. Advertisers who use both systems will now see Google and Salesforce stats in their dashboards. “We’re bringing together sales data, marketing data and advertising data that allows marketers to better engage with their consumers in ways that make things more personalized and more specific to the consumer versus blanket spam or sending them advertisements or promotions that don’t apply to them,” said Bob Stutz, CEO and chief analytics officer at Salesforce Marketing Cloud. “We’ll be able to take audiences that are built in Google Analytics and bring them directly into the Marketing Cloud in a way that allows our customers will be able to see that data directly in our application, which before was pretty difficult to see.” In one example of what marketers are now privy to, an electronics retailer could target someone who has searched and looked at new TVs online with an email campaign encouraging them to come into stores to see the TVs in person. Conversely, a brand can also home in on people who have opened up an email campaign with Google ads. “Now you can do that in a programmatic way, which before wasn’t possible,” said Babak Pahlavan, Google’s senior director of measurement and analytics. “These data sets have been fragmented and they continue to be fragmented—this announcement today tries to pull it all together.” Babak said that the Salesforce integration is the first time the company has deeply opened Google Analytics for a CRM solution, adding that “this has been the No. 1 thing [advertisers have] been asking for.” Salesforce’s deal with Google Analytics is part of a bigger global partnership between the companies. Salesforce customers will have access to Google Analytics 360, which is specifically geared for enterprise clients who want to analyze attribution. There’s also a tie-in with Google’s G-Suite to embed Salesforce’s products into Gmail, documents and video-conferencing tool Google Hangouts. Salesforce customers can a yearlong license to G-Suite for free. “We’ll be bringing together the two technology titans with one huge priority as it relates to helping our customers become smarter, more productive and more successful across the board,” said Ryan Aytay, evp of business development and strategic partnerships at Salesforce. “The partnership has a number of pillars to it.”