Google and Salesforce partner for better ad targeting across search

Google's partnership with Salesforces allows both companies to make identity-based matches based on CRM and email data, meaning they can target people across search, Gmail and YouTube. The tool is called Marketing Cloud for Google Customer Match and allows marketers to create audience segments. This is a significant move for Salesforce since its previous digital advertising efforts have solely focused on social ads on Facebook and Twitter. By partnering with Google they are now able to offer their clients more options and greater targeting capabilities.

When Google rolled out its CRM matching program Customer Match last fall, it seemed to follow in the footsteps of Facebook’s Custom Audiences, which launched in 2012. But Google’s strategic partnership with Salesforce, revealed Tuesday at the latter’s annual Connections conference in Atlanta, Georgia, boosts both companies’ ability to make identity-based matches based on CRM and email data. A tool called Marketing Cloud for Google Customer Match lets marketers and companies create audience segments, such as loyal customers or recent purchasers, within Salesforce and then target them across search, Gmail and YouTube. The move is significant since Salesforce’s digital advertising offering focused only on social ads on Facebook and Twitter, email, mobile and on-site personalization to date. (Salesforce also hooks into select ad tech partners like LiveRamp, Krux, and Neustar, who could onboard data into a DSP.) By linking up with the dominant search and email provider, Salesforce clients have much greater scale and targeting precision across third-party websites. “Because so much of advertisers’ budgets still goes to search, making that spend more effective and more relevant to marketers’ end customers, was really what this deal was all about,” said Gordon Evans, VP of product marketing for the Salesforce Marketing Cloud. For instance, a marketer searching for net new customers can exclude existing customers from an ad campaign, or if a certain audience were targeted for an email campaign, marketers can reduce the number of YouTube or search ads they see.

Marketing Cloud for Google Customer Match is more expansive than Google Customer Match, which only allows marketers to upload email lists, information collected from apps, newsletter/in-store signups, and web forms.

If a marketer is able to validate a customer and non-customer via a direct match to their email and database list, they can seemingly improve the accuracy of their bids across Google sites or through email.

“It will certainly enable new refinements around how sophisticated you can get with audience segments and the way you prioritize search terms that will be most valuable to your brand,” Evans added. “That way, you can serve an ad to reinforce brand loyalty in the moment [someone is] demonstrating intent around a brand or their product.”

Other Mar-Cloud Updates

Salesforce also rolled out Email Studio, which some of its product managers call Salesforce’s largest update to email in 10 years. It includes a simplified content management system built from the ground up, said Evans.

While the CMS can upload and tag new assets (table stakes), it also has the ability to push out content based on behavioral or demographic attributes or past consumer interactions.

Salesforce is also overhauling Social Studio (formerly Radian6/Buddy Media) and Active Audiences, first developed in 2014 to apply CRM data to targeted Twitter and Facebook campaigns. Both will be bundled into an offering called Advertising Studio.

Finally, Facebook Lead Ad capture now lets marketers auto-populate a form based on information that a customer has shared via Facebook Lead Ads, and immediately converts that information into a nurturing program. It will be generally available May 20.