Connect online and offline insights with Google Analytics 360 + Salesforce Sales Cloud

With customer touch points occurring across so many sources, it can be hard for marketers to create a complete — and accurate — view of the customer journey. And it’s even harder for marketers when a large portion of the sales process occurs offline.

That’s why you need solutions that can connect the missing pieces between online and offline customer interactions. When you have a complete view of the customer journey, you are able to understand how effective your marketing has been in delivering sales. Then you can improve the performance of your marketing campaigns by optimizing your bids or by focusing on the most valuable audiences.

Here’s the good news: Analytics 360 is integrated with Salesforce Sales Cloud. Sales Cloud is the leading sales platform and helps businesses manage their entire sales process, from initial lead to closed deal and beyond. With this integration, you can import your Sales Cloud data directly into Analytics 360, giving you a more complete view of all your customer touch points. These capabilities will help you better optimize your marketing campaigns and bring more customers to your sales teams.

Want to know which digital marketing channels are most effective in driving offline sales? For example, is organic search driving more sales compared to paid search? With your offline sales data from Salesforce Sales Cloud in Analytics 360, you now have the insights to help you answer this question.

You can also seamlessly measure conversions that happen offline, for example on the phone or in-person, without needing to manually import your offline data. Simply create Goals in Analytics 360 based on each type of Sales Cloud event. Then create a custom report that measures each of those goals so that you can understand the performance of your different marketing channels.

Custom Funnels in Analytics 360 enable you to visualize the steps your users are taking in order to complete a purchase on your website. Now with your Sales Cloud data integrated into Analytics 360, you can use Custom Funnels to see how successful your business is at turning online leads measured in Analytics 360 into offline sales measured in Sales Cloud.

Imagine you are a solar panel company, and your website has a lead form potential customers can use to get in touch with a member of your sales team. Now, you can use Custom Funnels to visualize what percentage of leads submitted online eventually schedule an installation on the phone. These visual reports help you identify drop-off points so that you can finetune the end-to-end customer experience and improve marketing performance.

Once you’ve created Goals based on your Sales Cloud events, you can also automatically optimize your digital marketing campaigns for actual sales that occur offline, instead of optimizing for form submissions on your site. Simply share these goals to Google Ads and Search Ads 360, then adapt your bidding strategy to optimize for these goals.

With advanced attribution tools in Analytics 360, you can create more accurate cross-channel attribution models so you can better understand what channels drive offline sales. For example, you may uncover that paid search and email drives more offline solar panel installations than social. You can use this information to optimize your investment for paid search and email —improving your return on ad spend (ROAS) in the process.

The connection between Analytics 360 and Salesforce Sales Cloud gives you even more audience attributes to work with, helping you improve the specificity of your audiences. For instance, you can create audience lists in Analytics 360 made up of qualified leads from Sales Cloud. You can then share these audiences with Display & Video 360, Search Ads 360, or Google Ads to reach them with more relevant ads.

You can take things further and use Custom Segments to create audience segments that combine your Salesforce Sales Cloud milestones and any other available dimensions and metrics. For example, you can create segments that help you find out which of your informational pages performed best and drove sales.

This deeper level of audience insight not only helps you with your immediate new customer acquisition but also can drive and sustain long-term customer growth. You can create audiences of people who have purchased one product or service and then promote a complementary product or service. For example, you can create an audience of users who recently installed a solar panel on their home, and then create a marketing campaign to promote a rechargeable home battery system.

Lastly, combining all of these offline and online insights is an involved, time-consuming process without the right solutions. An integrated approach helps you cut down on the waiting time from importing offline conversion data — which can take weeks — and instead helps you stitch together these insights in virtually real time.