In today’s digital advertising landscape, first-party data has become the foundation for effective customer engagement. With increasing privacy regulations and the decline of third-party cookies, marketers and advertisers must find new ways to enhance identity resolution, enrich customer profiles, and activate audiences across paid media platforms—all while ensuring compliance with data privacy laws.
Salesforce Data Cloud serves as a powerful solution for unifying and activating customer data, enabling businesses to securely connect, analyze, and act on real-time insights. However, to fully maximize the potential of Data Cloud, organizations need seamless integrations with identity providers, data enrichment platforms, and paid media channels such as Meta, Google, Amazon and leading demand-side platforms (DSPs) like theTradeDesk, Yahoo, Criteo and others.
This is where Salesforce AppExchange integrations come in. AppExchange provides pre-built integrations that allow Data Cloud customers to:
- Enrich customer profiles by connecting with identity resolution and data enhancement providers.
- Activate audience data by securely sharing hashed PII, mobile devices and other pseudonymous profiles with social platforms, ad networks, and programmatic advertising platforms.
- Maintain compliance through hashed data matching and encrypted audience activation.
This blog will explore:
- Identity & profile enrichment integrations that help unify customer data and enhance addressability.
- Paid media activation integrations that enable targeting across social, demand-side platforms (DSPs), ad servers, and more.
- Privacy-first approaches for securely sharing audience data without exposing raw PII.
- Additional Data Cloud connectors
- How to get started with AppExchange connectors to maximize your Data Cloud investment.
By leveraging the right integrations, marketers can improve audience reach, optimize ad spend, and drive better marketing outcomes—while staying compliant with evolving privacy regulations.
Unlocking the Power of Identity & Profile Enrichment
In a world where customers interact with brands across multiple devices, channels, and platforms, identity fragmentation is a major challenge for marketers. Without a unified customer profile, brands struggle to deliver personalized experiences, optimize ad spend, and accurately measure campaign performance.
This is where identity resolution and profile enrichment play a crucial role. By leveraging identity providers and data enrichment platforms, brands can:
- Resolve fragmented identities across devices and touchpoints to create a single customer view.
- Enhance customer profiles with demographic, behavioral, and transactional insights.
- Expand audience reach by matching first-party data with additional identifiers (e.g., hashed emails, phone numbers, mobile device IDs, OTT ID, and more).
- Improve ad targeting and measurement by ensuring more accurate and consistent identity mapping.
How Salesforce Data Cloud + AppExchange Integrations Enable Identity Enrichment
Salesforce Data Cloud provides the foundation for collecting and unifying first-party data, but AppExchange integrations extend its capabilities by integrating with leading identity resolution and data enrichment providers.
Here are some key categories of AppExchange integrations that support identity and profile enrichment:
- Identity Resolution Solutions: Connected integrations that unify customer data across multiple sources and resolve identities at scale.
- Data Enrichment Providers: Enhance customer profiles with demographic, behavioral, and firmographic data.
- Cross-Device & Multi-Touch Attribution: Improve identity matching across devices and touchpoints for improved addressability and better attribution modeling.
Use Case: Improving Customer Segmentation & Audience Expansion
A retail brand using Salesforce Data Cloud wants to improve its customer segmentation for personalized marketing. By leveraging an identity resolution integration, the brand can:
- Match offline CRM data (e.g., hashed emails, phone numbers) to online identifiers.
- Identify high-value customer segments with enriched data attributes.
- Activate these enriched profiles across Google, Meta, Amazon, and The Trade Desk for high-precision targeting.
By using AppExchange integrations, brands can extend the power of Data Cloud capabilities, ensuring more robust identity resolution and enriched insights for targeted marketing efforts.
Example enrichment integrations:
Learn how to untrap your data with hundreds of additional connectors available in Data Cloud.
Securely Activating First-Party Data in Paid Media Channels
Once brands have unified and enriched their customer data within Salesforce Data Cloud, the next step is activation—delivering audience insights to the right paid media platforms to drive conversions. To stay competitive, marketers need direct integrations with social media, DSPs, ad servers, and retail media platforms—allowing them to activate first-party data while maintaining privacy compliance.
How Data Cloud + AppExchange Integrations Enable Paid Media Activation
Salesforce Data Cloud offers native audience segmentation, and AppExchange integrations allow businesses to seamlessly push these audiences to paid media platforms in a secure, privacy-safe manner.
Streamline first-party data activation to paid media channels:
Activating first-party data in paid media platforms requires navigating a complex landscape of match key requirements, data formatting rules, and hashing methods—all of which vary across different advertising ecosystems. Salesforce Data Cloud AppExchange activation integrations handle this complexity, ensuring that your audience data is prepared, formatted, and securely transmitted in alignment with each platform’s specific requirements.
Each paid media platform supports a different subset of match keys—such as hashed emails, phone numbers, mobile advertising IDs (MAIDs), and first-party cookies—and enforces unique data processing rules. For example, some platforms require SHA-256 hashed emails, while others mandate E.164 phone number formatting before hashing. Manually configuring these variations for every channel is time-consuming and error-prone.
With Data Cloud activation integrations, businesses can:
- Automatically surface only the match keys supported by each paid media platform, eliminating guesswork and ensuring compatibility.
- Enforce platform-specific formatting and hashing methods before activation, ensuring that data is structured correctly for each integration.
- Seamlessly activate the same audience segment across multiple platforms, such as Meta, Google, and The Trade Desk, without the need for massaging data or duplicating segments.
- Utilize first-party data for multiple marketing channels, including email and SMS campaigns, where contact information and PII are handled differently within your owned environments compared to paid media activations.
Complete Control Over Consumer Consent Within Data Cloud
Beyond ensuring compliance with paid media platform requirements, Data Cloud provides businesses with complete control over enforcing consumer consent. Brands can:
- Define audience segmentation rules based on consumer preferences and data usage policies.
- Ensure that only consented data is activated for paid media, email, or SMS campaigns.
- Maintain a centralized governance model that aligns with regional privacy regulations, such as GDPR, CCPA, and emerging regional laws.
By leveraging Data Cloud’s activation integrations, businesses eliminate the heavy lift of managing match key variations, platform-specific hashing requirements, and consent enforcement, allowing them to focus on optimizing audience targeting and maximizing campaign performance.
Use Case: Using Data Cloud Integrations for Paid Media Activation
A travel brand wants to retarget past website visitors and expand audience reach across social and programmatic platforms. Using Salesforce Data Cloud & AppExchange integrations, they:
- Segment high-intent users based on past interactions.
- Activate to Meta to create a Lookalike for paid acquisition.
- Activate to theTradeDesk to take advantage of UID2 cross-device match for broader reach.
Take advantage of 400+ channels across our partner ecosystems:
Also available out-of-the-box in Data Cloud:
Watch the LinkedIn demonstration to see how it works, and learn more about segmentation and activation in the Data Cloud help documents.
Getting Started with AppExchange Integrations for Data Cloud
Find the Right AppExchange Integrations
- Search by Use Case – Look for data enrichment or data activation apps within the Data Cloud collection.
- Check Integration Details – Review the integration’s capabilities for supporting different identifiers, such as email addresses, phone numbers, mobile ids, etc.
- Direct a System Admin user to install in a few simple clicks to enable in Data Cloud Setup > External Connectors
- Configure each integration as needed or let your marketers know that new activation channels are available to activate segments, obtain audience insights, and more.
Note: Each marketer can easily perform a one-time connection to each channel to authenticate or connect their respective ad accounts and schedule segment delivery in a few simple steps.
Unifying Data Cloud & Paid Media for Smarter Marketing
By leveraging Salesforce Data Cloud with AppExchange integrations, brands can seamlessly activate audience segments across multiple channels while maintaining full control over how data is formatted, secured, and delivered.
Explore Data Cloud Connectors and the extended Salesforce AppExchange integrations today and transform how you activate first-party data in paid media.
Invite Your Preferred Partners to Join AppExchange
If you don’t see an enrichment or activation partner already integrated with Data Cloud, you have the power to expand your ecosystem. By inviting them to join the AppExchange partner community, they can integrate with Data Cloud using standardized integration options, unlocking seamless connectivity and greater flexibility for your marketing stack. For instance, if you work with a specific paid media platform, or a specialized data enrichment partner offering unique consumer insights, or even a publisher-direct first-party data onboarding, you can encourage them to integrate. This ensures Data Cloud can directly connect with these key players in your advertising ecosystem. The Nine Audience Activation AppExchange listing is an example of a region-specific publisher-direct activation app that is enabled through the power of the AppExchange.
Encouraging your preferred partners to join AppExchange ensures that you can customize your Data Cloud experience while maintaining access to the tools and platforms that drive your advertising and AI strategies. This approach not only strengthens your data-driven marketing efforts but also future-proofs your ability to adapt as new partners and technologies emerge.
Once a partner has joined the partner community, they will have the opportunity to create an enrichment or activation integration using our Ingestion App Trailhead or Activation Trailhead guidance. Additional advanced use cases and alt ids may also be supported using the recent Activation Toolkit enhancements.
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