• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, May 10, 2016

An aggressive move by Salesforce to build out its advertising offerings has the company matching up with Google.

Salesforce's integration with Google announced Tuesday allows its clients to use first-party data from email, loyalty and purchase programs from their own customers to serve ads to specific consumers on Google properties such as Gmail, YouTube and search.

The integration of Google Customer Match through Salesforce's Advertising Studio, formerly Social.com, allows clients and their agency partners to create segments through Active Audiences, which integrates first-party CRM data with social ad data to buy and optimize ads.

It all comes down to integrating data and following the customer journey through the sales process, Scott McCorkle, CEO of Salesforce Marketing Cloud, explained at Salesforce Connections in Atlanta.

Meghann York, director of product marketing for Salesforce Marketing Cloud, told Search Marketing Daily that the new feature of Advertising Studio aims to produce "really targeted ads," rather than "big ads that reach large audiences." It also integrates with Facebook and Twitter, targeting ads with support from CRM data. All this data tied together aims to support what the advertising industry calls lookalike or one-to-one targeting.

Privacy and trust have become part of the equation when the conversation turns to custom audience segments. Customer data puts a certain level of privacy into the conversation that wasn't before when we spoke about mass advertising, York said. "Trust is our number one priority, so this platform was developed with that in mind."

For better or for worse, marketers are cozying up with their company's legal departments. Retailers have begun to create custom contracts with the brands they sell products through their ecommerce sites.

Despite the success, brands at last week's MediaPost Search Insider Summit notes privacy compliance as the biggest challenge they face when using Customer Match. Stefanie Hineman, online advertising marketing manager at Intuit, told attendees there's a lot of discussion around privacy and legal issues around any platform that lets marketers create customer audiences with first-party data.

New ad products like Customer March attributed to the success of paid search in 2015, according to Hanapin Marketing. Data released Tuesday from a poll done in January 2016 suggests that 46% of marketers believe when it came to pay-per-click advertising, Customer Match made the biggest impact for them last year. Gmail ads followed with 22%; call-only campaigns, 19%; Instagram, 12%; and image extensions in Bing, 1%.