The wealth of data gathered on the internet is invaluable; the data is used to analyze everything from ROI metrics to leads to campaign management. Integrating CRM with Google Analytics is a great way to harness this vast and swirling sea of data into bottom lines; But is there an easy solution for Google Analytics Salesforce integration?
For a long time, Google Analytics Salesforce integration wasn’t possible, and when a solution was initially figured out to accomplish it, it wasn’t officially supported by either company.And man, was it a complicated affair!
One of the bigger problems people encountered was that the code snippets used by Adwords (a component of the Google Analytics suite) didn’t jive well with the field data handling in Salesforce. In addition, Analytics fields loved to give immense, unprocessed strings of data that added a lot of excess fluff to the data Salesforce received. These problems are still slightly present, but were abated significantly once official support of connectivity between the technologies was possible.
What do I need to do?
Integrating apps or services with Salesforce is usually simple. Unfortunately, there is no easy single-click button that just snaps these components together. But on a positive note, the process is much easier than it used to be.
The easiest way to do it has to be with CloudAmp; a Salesforce extension. CloudAmp has several prebuilt dashboards that make the trick, of mapping the Analytics web fields to Salesforce, very straightforward. Note that fluffy data is still present, but at least CloudAmp solves the old problem of Adwords code snippets misaligning.
This isn’t the only solution, however.
It’s still possible to do it the old fashioned way. You’ll need to test out your analytics fields, create matching fields in Salesforce yourself, and then build the path. Anyone familiar with a flexible CRM system, like Salesforce, is familiar with this form of mapping. But it’s a very complex approach; otherwise tools like CloudAmp wouldn’t have become so popular.
Finally, if you want absolute control over the process yourself, and you want to address all the potential issues directly, it will require a little elbow work. You can actually write JavaScript handling modules that relay the data from Google Analytics fields to an Apex-base receiver in Salesforce. During this process, you can also clean up the data and remove any fluff you don’t need, so that when it arrives in Salesforce for storage and recording, it has already been formatted (you won’t have to manually clean up after it).
A basic example of this JavaScript-based solution, (which you can build upon further to meet your needs, can be found at here. (https://www.e-nor.com/blog/google-analytics/integrate-salesforce-and-google-analytics).
So, all in all, it’s not nearly as tricky as it used to be to achieve Google Analytics Salesforce integration, but it’s still not a perfect integration like some other one-click solution these days. The approach that’s best for you depends on how confident you are in working with data-oriented programming, along with how much per-transmission control you want over the data before Salesforce receives it. Good luck!