Salesforce touts Google Ads, ecommerce, social media integration for Customer 360

Salesforce has previewed a bunch of updates to its Customer 360 platform promising close integration with external data sources including Google ads, ecommerce marketplaces and social media.

Using Salesforce Customer Data Platform, the update is intended that clients will be able to use their internal data to create a customer profile to build marketing campaigns on Google Ads.

The CRM giant argues that joining data held on its system with Google Ads will help customers personalize marketing campaigns using first-party data instead of cookies and, in the future, incorporate more detailed analysis at the Customer Data Platform interface. The feature will be available in a few months, the company said.

As readers will recall, Google expects to kill all third party cookies in its Chrome browser by "late 2023". The web giant's browser dominates the market with a whopping 66 percent share of desktop users.

Meanwhile, Salesforce is launching its Intelligence Ecommerce Marketing Insights App, designed to put commerce, marketing data, and KPIs for ecommerce on a single platform which will support interactive dashboards. It is expected to be generally available in October 2022.

Intelligence Connector for B2C Commerce Cloud hits the streets today, promising to combine orders and product data, "unlocking insights into product, revenue, and sales performance over time," according to the vendor. Marketers will get a live feed on orders placed during a promotion, or the top three products ordered by different customer demographics.

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The vendor also promises that by using its Social Integration tool, businesses can create and automate product feeds, segment audiences, and publish ads while finding and targeting new audiences, for example, on TikTok or other platforms.

And in a move that is bound to delight or horrify some Reg readers, Salesforce also announced support for non-fungible tokens, or NFTs. The NFT Cloud pilot will allow companies to brand, mint, manage, and sell the controversial web tokens.

Hiring in a 'more measured way'

The announcements come against a backdrop of solid financial results for the application and platform vendor, while other SaaS providers have struggled to meet the financial expectations of the market.

Speaking at a Bank of America conference this week, CFO Amy Weaver said the company was still hiring to support its growth, despite the economic uncertainty, although in a more "measured way."

"Salesforce hired 20,000 new employees in the last 12 months and 4,000 in Q1 alone. Looking forward, we are still hiring. We have plenty of listings up that you will see [we are] asking our teams to really prioritize. You'll see us hiring in a more measured way this year.

"We've asked each team to really step up at their budgets, look at their headcount and make sure that they are really tightly prioritizing to make sure that every head that we bring in is absolutely aligned with our goal to customer success and our top strategic initiatives." ®