Integrating Salesforce Sales Cloud with Google Analytics [Part 2 of 2]
This article will explain how to pass user behavior (pages viewed, videos played, documents downloaded, etc.) from Google Analytics into your Salesforce Sales Cloud records. This is the second post in my 2-part series about sharing data between Google Analytics and Salesforce, so be sure to check out post #1 about the benefits and limitations of the standard integrations provided by Google and Salesforce.
Before we jump into the solution, let me quickly describe the problem that we are solving.
-
Migrated this website from my blog at https://ken-williams.com
-
Updated to account for numerous product updates from Google and Salesforce that change how I complete this solution.
The Problem We Are Trying to Solve: Google Analytics Salesforce Integration
Any company that has installed Google Analytics (which is just about every company with a website) is already collecting an enormous amount of behavioral data about their website users. This Google Analytics user data includes which pages a user views, what they are clicking on, how recently and frequently have they visited, etc. This information could be extremely valuable to a salesperson who needs to understand questions like these:
- Which product is this a lead interested in purchasing?
- How long has it been since this person last visited the site?
- Has this person viewed our promotional content (such as one-pagers or videos)?
- What search terms have they been entering?
- Which help articles have they been reading?
Imagine how useful it would be to have this information appear directly within your Salesforce Lead, Contact and Opportunity records!
Unfortunately, however, this type of information is not passed into Sales Cloud with the standard integration (as I explained in post #1 of this series). These standard integrations between Google Analytics and Salesforce are intended to benefit marketers (who are concerned with groups of people), and not necessarily sales teams (who manage relationships with individual leads).
At this point, you might be thinking, “This shouldn’t be a difficult problem to solve.” Well…
Why This is a Difficult Problem to Solve
While it’s not impossible, very few companies are doing this today because the following two challenges have been difficult to overcome (until recently):
- You need access to the raw hit-level data that Google Analytics captures to do this (you cannot access the behavior of an individual user with the Google Analytics reporting APIs alone).
- You need to build or buy an application that can automate the data transfer process to push this data into Salesforce.
The only way to get around these two challenges is to use the Collect Tracking Code , which is JavaScript that you can add to a website to fire behavioral data directly to Salesforce. This is a non-starter for most companies because it means re-tagging your website or application to copy the same information it sends to Google Analytics and fire it into Salesforce.
This is inefficient and introduces a whole host of other new challenges. If you are already capturing the data you need in Google Analytics, it is better to overcome these two challenges than attempt to skirt around them.
Now for some good news: These challenges are realitevly easy and inexpensive to overcome (even if you're not purchasing GA 360), and I'll explain how to do it.
What Software You'll Needed
- Google Analytics 4 Data in BigQuery
As I stated in problem #1 above, you'll need access to raw event-level Google Analytics data. If you purchase the enterprise version (GA 360 -- starts at $50,000 per year) then the integration is free, and then most companies pay $100-$200 per month for storage and queries. If you do not purchase GA 360 then you can use server-side Google Tag Manager to stream data into BigQuery for about $400-$600 per month. - CRM Analytics [formerly known as Einstein Analytics or Tableau CRM] (
read more
)
CRM Analytics is an excellent tool for solving this problem, and it only costs $125 per month. It allows you to connect to your data in BigQuery, as well as create visualizations and embed them in your records. Tableau CRM is not required to pull GA data into Sales Cloud, but it simplifies the integration so much that it is not worth building manually.
Preparing Your Google Analytics Data
First of all, the “garbage in, garbage out” rule applies here. If you do not trust the data you are capturing in Google Analytics, you should address that issue before embarking on this process.
Secondly, the official integration between Google Analytics and the Salesforce Sales Cloud is a prerequisite for this to work. This is how you pass the user identifiers that are used by Google Analytics into your Salesforce lead records, and this will be the join key that you use to merge the two sources.
Your Google Analytics data will be fully prepared to integrate with Salesforce Sales Cloud when the following two tasks are complete: 1) GA identifiers are passing into Salesforce when forms are submitted on the website/app, and 2) good quality Analytics data is sitting in a BigQuery table in the Google Cloud Platform.
Once you check those two boxes you can move on to import your data into Salesforce.
Setting Up the Import
Here are the steps:
- Create a query that pulls the data that you would like to import to Salesforce into a flat table, and schedule this table to be updated daily after the prior day’s data is added to a BigQuery table.
- (optional) At this point, you may also choose to conduct analysis on this data before it is imported to Salesforce. For example, this is a great time to run a recommendations engine, propensity model, or clustering algorithm.
- In Salesforce, you will need to create new objects for the fields that you would like to add.
- Then, you will use Tableau CRM to transfer the Google Analytics data sitting in BigQuery to a Tableau CRM Dataset. From here you can set up a data flow to merge the Analytics data with your lead records.
- Once the data is in Tableau CRM, you can build reports and generate visuals that will be embedded back to your lead and opportunity records.
That's all there is to it, but if you would like help from an expert you can fill out the form below to schedule a call with someone from our team!
