Salesforce, Google to bring marketing, Analytics 360 data together under strategic partnership

Salesforce and Google have teamed up under a new strategic partnership that will see the pair bring together marketing, sales and advertising data from the CRM vendor’s platforms with Google Analytics 360 for real-time interaction.

The extended alliance, announced at the Dreamforce conference, focuses on four key areas, all designed to more deeply integrate and develop the two technology offerings. The first is expansion of the GSuite and Salesforce partnership to provide deeper integrations between the two product sets.

These include the already available integration of Salesforce Lightning and Gmail to surface relevant CRM data in Gmail and vice versa; plus the ability to surface customer and account details, service case history and other CRM insights into the Hangouts meet interface during real-time interactions.

Secondly, a fresh alliance with the Google Analytics team will see data from the Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Sales Cloud seamlessly connected to Google Analytics 360 for the first time. The intention is to give users more extensive consumer insights that can also then be leveraged through Google’s ad platforms.

As an example, the companies said marketers will be able to create customised audiences in Analytics 360 then push them into Marketing Cloud to orchestrate activities across digital channels. Analytics 360 data will also be now available directly through the Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

“We’re taking the number one marketing analytics platform and marrying it with number one marketing engagement platform,” Salesforce CEO of Marketing Cloud and chief analytics officer, Bob Stutz, said in a press conference. “That benefits both customers and consumers today.”

The deal represents the first time Google has directly integrated with a marketing platform provider, Stutz said.

“Today for customers to take a segment from analytics and put it into the Marketing Cloud is a little tough. This integration will make it seamless to bring those audiences into our platform,” he said.

Google VP display, video and analytics, Paul Muret, said advertisers and marketers have different lenses to sales and other internal teams, but all want and need those insights to be based on a common data foundation.

“Seamlessly flowing data across those systems is super important,” he said. “We‘re blending anonymous and known data together and data will flow back and forth.”

In response to how the Krux data management platform (DMP) could fit in this scenario, Stutz noted a DMP is just one data set in multiple sources constantly now being used to engage customers.

“There’s no one database, there are multiple databases that reside out in cloud infrastructure,” he explained. “It’s bringing data together in real-time way – whether it’s analytics, DMP, Marketing Cloud, or insights feeding into Google Analytics. It’s about all that data flowing in real time to give customers the right offers at the right time.”

The third element of the partnership is to use Google Cloud a preferred public cloud provider for Salesforce. This decision will see the latter using Google’s cloud platform for core services as it further extends internationally. These new regions have not yet been named, but a spokesperson confirmed the relationship doesn’t change Salesforce’s current relationship with rival cloud provider, Amazon Web Services, who is also a preferred partner for regions such as Australia.

The fourth pillar and final pillar is Google standardising on the Salesforce CRM platform.

To mark the deal, Google will offer Salesforce customers not currently using its productivity tools a free licence for the first year.

Speaking at the keynote opening, Google SVP of cloud, Diane Greene, said technology is such an amazing industry to be in and the game-changing opportunities just keep emerging.

"We’re able to bring so much to the world through all our technologies," she said. "Cloud is such an incredible revolution, allowing companies to seamlessly partner together. The more we work together, the more easy, seamless and powerful things become for our customers."

Salesforce chairman and CEO, Marc Benioff, said the partnership with Google represents the best of both worlds for respective customers.

“There has never been an easier way for companies to run their entire business in the cloud – from productivity apps, email and analytics, to sales, service and marketing apps," he said. "This partnership will help make our customers smarter and more productive.”

• Nadia Cameron travelled to Dreamforce in San Francisco as a guest of Salesforce.