Salesforce Sales Cloud integrates with Google Analytics 360

The first phase of the Google and Salesforce partnership has been rolled out.

In November at Dreamforce, Salesforce announced a strategic partnership with Google that makes the 150,000 customers of Salesforce eligible for G Suite licenses at no additional cost for up to a year.

Phase one of that partnership comes in the form of an integration that allows advertisers and agencies to import data related to their sales leads and pipeline data from Salesforce Sales Cloud into Google Analytics 360, the premium analytics product by Google.

In doing so, advertisers and agencies will gain a complete overview of the customer journey, including digital and offline touchpoints that result in conversions.

In the announcement post, Kyle Harrison, the group product manager for Google Analytics, emphasized that the first phase of the integration would give users a complete understanding of campaign performance, and make it so that audiences tabulated in Analytics can be tracked and targeted via the Salesforce Marketing Cloud via email marketing.

In return, Google Cloud was declared the preferred cloud provider of Salesforce, with the integration allowing tools such as Salesforce Lightning and Salesforce Quip to link into Gmail, Hangouts, and Google Calendar easily, without any middleware.

While Salesforce already has Einstein Analytics, the partnership gives both companies further access to each other's customer data and reach, including insights across the marketing funnel.

The same logic was applied to validate the $26 billion acquisition of LinkedIn by Microsoft, accentuating the quality of the CRM tools offered.

Integrations such as these allow marketers to bridge data on customers collected via offline and online methods, allowing campaigns to be launched without the need for laborious integrations.