San Francisco-based Salesforce is known for its customer relationship management (CRM) platform. The platform helps businesses around the world connect their marketing, sales, commerce, service, and IT teams – giving businesses a shared view of their customers to help drive business growth.
Recently, Salesforce saw an opportunity to unify its own view of its customers. Salesforce had been using an analytics tool that provided reporting across all of its websites, but even compiling basic reports was complex and took too long. Plus, reports of user journeys across the Salesforce websites were disjointed, meaning that unified user engagement insights across properties like the corporate blog and product pages slipped through the gaps. Understanding the impact of multiple visits, or connected visits, was difficult for the team.
Multi-Channel Funnels wasn't possible, either. With its legacy tool, Salesforce wasn’t able to evaluate the impact that various marketing channels – for example paid digital ads, email campaigns, or paid search – were having on conversions on its website. Salesforce knew that they were leaving insights on the table, and began searching for a more integrated solution.
The move to Google Analytics 360
To prioritize what its teams needed in a new solution, Salesforce ran an internal survey, asking what expectations everyone had for an analytics tool, the problems the teams wanted to solve, and the type of support they needed along the way.
Next, Salesforce worked alongside partner Cardinal Path to restructure how their organization approached digital analytics. Their key objective throughout the restructuring was simplicity and data democratization, which is one of the reasons they turned to Analytics 360, part of Google Marketing Platform, for their new analytics solution.
Another factor in Salesforce's decision to implement Analytics 360 was its simple, streamlined integration with Salesforce Marketing Cloud. With this combination of solutions, the team could trigger personalized customer email journeys, and optimize the website experience and journeys across different channels.
“Salesforce’s move to Analytics 360 is a milestone in raising our digital maturity,” says Michael Andrew, Vice President, Data, AI, and Personalization. “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.”
To ramp up adoption of Analytics 360 across teams, Salesforce held internal trainings, and set up office hours so that anyone could come in and ask questions or get some guidance for troubleshooting.
Now fully integrated, Salesforce has a single interface for reporting across all Salesforce-owned sites. The teams can also drill down into insights about their own work on the website. Salesforce’s digital marketing team can now access both campaign and user engagement insights faster than before.
Audience Analysis Segmentation
One of the goals for the digital marketing team’s new analytics tool was to really understand which audiences were visiting their website, and how to segment them for the most effective messaging and a seamless user journey ahead.
Using Google Cloud’s enterprise data warehouse, BigQuery. Salesforce created and trained machine learning models within BigQuery to unearth behavioral patterns across more than 50 different metrics. Using BigQuery ML’s K-means clustering model, they created unique customer segments and categorized users into five personas based on those insights. Each persona, they discovered, had a unique preference for the type of content they found the most engaging. “Consideration Clare,” for example, was drawn to videos.
Now, Salesforce is building on this insight. They’re finding new ways to optimize content recommendations to the relevant user personas, in order to encourage site visitors to convert to customers.
Integrated Campaign Analysis
The team also needed to understand the performance of marketing campaigns and optimize their investment across channels. They also used Analytics 360 to meet these goals, as it identified traffic sources, matching the right channel to the incoming traffic from sources such as auto-tagging enabled by product linking and UTM tags.
Now, the team can understand which digital media efforts produce the best results, creating better targeted campaigns. Salesforce can also access full-funnel reporting, and measure visitors and engagement across all their web properties.
For an even fuller integration, Salesforce teams are building dashboards through their own internal platforms to combine Analytics 360 campaign traffic data with Salesforce CRM conversion data for one view. This way, campaign managers can compare various campaigns, and easily see the ROI of advertising efforts.
Looking Ahead with Analytics 360
As for next steps, Salesforce is working on widely spreading the benefits of Analytics 360 across the company. The teams are preparing to integrate the solution into even more of their digital properties, including Trailhead and AppExchange.
“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,” says Michael.
