Integrating “marketing” and “analytical” data

Integrating marketing and analytical data

Jean-Christophe Gabriel

Partner Digital Strategist at Adjust

6 min read

How to create a holistic view of the customer journey? Consider these two datasets. There is a first set of "marketing" data, which aggregates all the data that the brand has stored in its CRM tool, to be used for campaign setups. But on the other side of the equation, there is the "analytical" dataset provided by Google, tracking visits to the brand's website. Marketers often struggle to get a holistic view of the customer journey because they don't have the right tools to connect the platforms.

Google Analytics Connector

That being said, it is technically possible to transmit to Google Analytics a "fragment of code" (called "UTM") that identifies a series of parameters defined at the campaign level. The idea is to connect the data from any given marketing campaign to Google Analytics.

The UTM parameters (an acronym for Urchin Tracking Module) are placed at the end of the "bare URL" − most often following a question mark − and don’t affect access to the landing page. They are generally made up of 3 main parameters (utm source / media / campaign) that identify the media and campaign used to connect to the website.

Let's take the example of a promotional action you want to launch on a new product. You can easily determine which customers would be the most interested in this action. It might be those who engaged with the email sent three months ago by your CRM platform to announce the new product and have viewed similar products on your website in the last 30 days. All you have to do is to create this audience in Google Analytics 360 and share it with your CRM tool. You can then reach this audience with relevant and personalized email campaigning.

Google Marketing Platform and Salesforce Marketing Cloud

The Salesforce Marketing Cloud, which includes the Email Studio email marketing tool, is seamlessly integrated into the Google Marketing Platform tools, including Analytics 360.

If you use both Google Analytics 360 and Salesforce Marketing Cloud, it is easy to pool the information provided by these two systems, as they were designed to work synergistically. The integration between Analytics 360 and Marketing Cloud makes it easy to connect “customer engagement” metrics from Analytics 360 with your Marketing Cloud reports. This provides you with consolidated reports that help understand customer engagement from end-to-end.

Gemstone, the hub created by Adjust

Salesforce Marketing Cloud and GMP are great tools, but they are relatively expensive. Adjust has developed Gemstone software to provide small and medium companies with a unified, seamless view of the customer journey.

Gemstone can be compared to a hub, which interconnects personal data from the CRM, data inputs from website forms and analytical data from Google Analytics, says Jean-Christophe Gabriel, Managing Partner of the Adjust Group. This technology has now been used by our customers for 7 years. The basic module is offered to all the agency's clients. It is part of our service portfolio. Additional modules can be activated upon request as an annual subscription model.

Better together

Getting the big picture − a complete view of the customer journey − can be difficult when your team is working with multiple marketing channels on different platforms. Integrating analytics and personal data into a unified hub makes this connection seamless, bringing marketing and analytics together to improve the performance of your campaigns and track it more effectively.