Executive Summary

Salesforce is an integrated CRM platform that unites marketing, sales, commerce, service, and more to give companies a single source of truth about their customers. When it came to website reporting, we faced many challenges around timely data, attribution models, and measuring the impact of paid digital ads due to a legacy web analytics tool. Our recent implementation of Google Analytics 360 modernized our digital marketing analytics infrastructure, while supporting our digital-first imperative. There is now one holistic interface for reporting across Salesforce-owned sites. Audiences can be created in Analytics 360 and usedto trigger personalized customer journeys within Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

How Salesforce Modernized Its Website Reporting with Google Analytics 360

Salesforce’s Web Analytics Challenges

Our digital marketing organization had been using a highly customized analytics tool for our website reporting. Even basic reports were cumbersome and time consuming to produceand required a significant amount of user training and application of segments. The legacy web analytics provider did not natively integrate with Google Ads, further complicating reporting efforts due to the siloed technology.

In addition, we lacked the ability to do multichannel funnel reporting and, as a result, could not fully measure the impactof its paid digital efforts, Google Ad buys, and any other third-party media investment. Our global marketers had limited views ofuser journeys and engagement across website sections, suchas the corporate blog, product pages, and more, and hadadditional challenges connecting the impact of multiple visits.Gaps in managing audiences in a privacy-centric way contributedto a transactional and disconnected experience for prospectsand customers.

Faster availability of campaign and user engagement insights to digital marketers.

ads spending

86%faster85%

Multichannel performance reports unified with native product integrations.

The Move to Google Analytics 360

Along with establishing a strategic partnership with Google, Salesforce made the move to a more scalable and comprehensive web analytics solution in Google Marketing Platform (GMP). Google is a California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) compliant vendor and further supports our General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) compliance, as well as its efforts to ensure personal identifiable information (PII) is not captured without the consent and trust of customers.

The foundational piece of this new chapter is Analytics 360.For the first phase, our data and platform strategy team surveyed internal users to identify what they most needed from an analytics solution, the problems they were trying to solve, and the support they needed around all of it. We then restructured our analytics framework with a focus on simplicity and data democratization. This was accomplished by working with the capabilities of the platform rather than building more complex customized frameworks, as had been the case in the previous implementation.

The next step was to integrate Salesforce’s own CRM data with Analytics 360 and then Search Ads 360. Analytics 360 helps us optimize the website experience and journeys across different marketing channels, plus it integrates with Salesforce Marketing Cloud, triggering personalized customer email journeys. Search Ads 360 allows us to optimize our media buys based on the touches that have already been reported to us in Analytics 360. Product integrations built into GMP help connect the advertising ecosystem and the digital behaviors on Salesforce’s websites. Joining this with CRM data helps to relate those behaviors to meaningful business outcomes.

During the implementation process, digital marketing also worked with stakeholders to educate their users on the new analytics tools. This included creating enablement resources and holding live training and office hours for guidance and troubleshooting. Nearly a third of the digital marketing teamwas enabled at launch, with 100% as the ultimate target for that organization. Analytics 360 also supports self-service web analytics — or “citizen analytics” — for additional marketing teams aboutthe work done on the website every day.

Salesforce + GMP Example Use CasesIntegrated Campaign Analysis

Salesforce’s paid digital team needs to help campaign managers understand the performance

of different marketing campaigns and optimize investment across channels (such as paid display, paid social, and more). The team is building dashboards using our Datorama platform to bring together Analytics 360 campaign traffic data and Salesforce CRM conversion data in integrated reporting views. This allows campaign managers to compare various campaigns, and understand how investmentin advertising compares to the value of opportunities resulting from those campaigns. Audience Analysis Segmentation

Our digital marketing teams want to understand the makeup of website visitors and to effectively bucket them into categories for providing more targeted content and messaging appropriate to their needs and journey within Salesforce’s digital properties. The digital experimentation team is partnering with Google and using BigQuery’s machine learning capabilities to analyze past user behaviors and develop clusters of users showing similar patterns of behavior. Users’ cluster membership is then imported back into Analytics 360 to use for targeting content more appropriate to their needs.

Looking Ahead

Now that phase one of Salesforce’s GMP implementation is completed, we will be expanding intotwo additional phases. Its holistic view of website data will first be expanded to a small subset of all web properties, including Trailhead and AppExchange, before expanding to additional digital properties, such as acquisitions MuleSoft and Tableau. The end goal of all of this will be the ability to pull in data across the board, so the customer journey is visible and personalized across every stage.

Results and Return on Investment

Salesforce’s Analytics 360 implementation has modernized our digital marketing analytics infrastructure, while supporting its digital-first imperative. There is now one holistic interface for reporting across Salesforce-owned sites. Analytics 360 has democratized data by supporting self-service web analytics,so teams can access and drill down into insights about the work they are doing on the website every day.

Since Analytics 360 supports better identification of traffic sources through auto tagging and product linking, as well as through manual UTM tags, we are able to ensure the appropriate channels receive credit for the traffic and actions driven to their site. This means increased visibility into which paid digital media efforts are effective — whether display, paid search, or social — allowing digital marketing to create more targeted media campaigns. Full-funnel reporting has also been unlocked and we now have the abilityto measure traffic and engagement for ungated website content.

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“Salesforce’s move to Google Analytics 360 is a milestone in raising our digital maturity. The advanced marketing analytics capabilities of Google combined with the power of Salesforce’s CRM data will enable Salesforce’s marketers to make better decisions to drive ROI and customer success.”Michael AndrewVice President, Data, AI, and Personalization, Salesforce

For more information on how Marketing Cloud and Analytics 360 work together, contact your sales representative or visit salesforce.com/google.