Google & Salesforce – what is possible?

If you didn’t notice yet, Salesforce plays pretty well with Google. Also very often customers already use Google Apps and they ask what is possible in terms of integration.

Let’s take a look at what I found.

  • Salesforce Essentials for free
  • Web-to-Lead and UTM parameters
  • Web-to-Lead and Google AdWords
  • Single Sing-On with Google
  • Lightning Sync
  • Einstein Activity Capture
  • Gmail pane
  • Google Drive Integration
  • Data Connector
  • Analytics 360
  • Google Analytics for Salesforce Communities

Salesforce Essentials for free

A while ago there was a promotion which gave Salesforce users access to Google Apps for free (for a year), now it is the other way around and you get Salesforce Essentials for three months for free (if you are user of Google Workspace, the new name for G Suite).

Web-to-Lead and UTM parameters

Web-to-Lead is the easiest way how to connect your web to Salesforce to create leads. You can definitely have different landing pages with different web-to-lead forms, each with hidden field saying from which page the lead was created. At the same time your marketing people probably want and do utilize the UTM parameters and would love to catch this level of granularity on leads.

The good news? It is possible! Just create the fields you need and simple JavaScript can fill them in with values as described in gaconnector article.

Use Pardot?

For Pardot there is dedicated Google Analytics connector, which basically do the same and fill-in the section on prospect record.

The Spot for Pardot has a whole blog post about it.

Web-to-Lead and Google AdWords

It is really great, you have all the UTM parameters in Salesforce, know which campaing brings the most people. But maybe it would be also nice to have this info in Google AdWords, because the conversion you are looking for is not when lead is created, but when opportunity is won.

Again, the good news is, that this should be possible, thanks to something called GCLID. The full setup is described on Google site, full disclosure here – at the time of writing this article I wasn’t able to connect those two systems together 🙁

Single Sign-On with Google

When you have users in Google Apps, it makes sense to allow them to use the same username and password to login to Salesforce and have one struggle less. And I already wrote an article how to do it.

Lightning Sync

Sorry new customers, this feature went away in Winter ’21. For the older customers it is still available and allows you to sync contacts and calendars between Salesforce and Gmail on server-to-server basis, no need to setup anything on client side.

The whole process is described in Salesforce help, basically you need to setup something on Google side and then something on Salesforce, choose for which users it should sync things and then be patient.

For new customers there is Einstein Activity Capture, which has completely different set of features.

Einstein Activity Capture

This feature is similar to Lightning Sync as it also sync contacts and events, but on top of that it can capture emails sent and received in Gmail.

The important word in the previous sentence is „capture“, because things which are captured are not stored in Salesforce (even though it look like), but they are stored on AWS servers and will disappear in 6 months plus you cannot report on them with standard reports. See other limitations in help.

For setup you basically just assign users, which should use this feature, specific permission set, create configuration (what will be synced and what is the default sharing type) and then users need to authenticate with Gmail (the same works for MS Exchange, where you can also use system account).

Gmail pane

I would say the most used integration between Google and Salesforce – addon to Chrome browser, which adds into your Gmail right panel. When you open email, it will find that email in Salesforce and show relevant information, plus you can save the email with one click into Salesforce.

The same works when sending email plus a few other features, such as use templates you have in SF or create additional records.

I already wrote about it a while ago and covered other ways how to get emails into Salesforce as well.

Google Drive integration

Previously (Classic era) you could link Google Docs directly to records in Salesforce. It has been changed greatly with Lightning and Files and now you can use Files Connect (included for free) for similar use case. And I already wrote a blog post about it.

The great thing is, that it can respect your rights in Google Drive, able to do a file preview and a few additional things compared to the previous functionality.

Data Connector

I’m not sure this add-on to Google Sheets is as awesome as XL-Connector, but it works pretty well (as much as I tested).

Google Data Connector

You have to install the plug-in to Google Sheets (nothing with your browser), then you authenticate your org and it can show a pane on right side.

Get data from report or import them to sheet based on SOQL or user defined filter plus selection which fields you want to get. And then you can select rows (or all of them) and update or insert them back to Salesforce.

Pretty cool, I didn’t play with limits, but this can be super awesome for regular users.

Analytics 360

This one is big, a lot of customers ask me how to import Google Analytics data to Salesforce and I always have to say that Google Analytics is something else to Analytics 360.

But if you can spare those $150 000 per year you can get some extra value as sales data will be available in Analytics for use in attribution, bid optimization and audience creation, data from Analytics can be available in Marketing Cloud at all these fancy things.

Salesforce Communities and Google Analytics

It makes sense to track how people use your community and there is nothing easier that to add the Google Analytics ID into your community.

What did I miss?

Are you aware of any other integration between Salesforce and Google I missed? Let me know, super curious to hear that.

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