5 Great Tools For Optimizing Google AdWords in Salesforce

Looking back on my first visit to Dreamforce, the massive cloud computing conference that now regularly draws over 100,000 attendees, I recall noting how few marketers seemed to be in attendance. The conference sported a dazzling array of name-brand business leaders and technologists, but most attendees seemed to be Salesforce administrators, developers from partner companies, and sales managers. Unless you were clued into the coming wave of sales and marketing alignment stirring in Silicon Valley, there wasn’t much to draw marketers.

A rare exception was a demo for Salesforce for Google AdWords (SFGA), an early Salesforce acquisition. SFGA allowed marketers to easily pass Google AdWords data into the CRM, making it possible to generate truly valuable Salesforce dashboards and reports. For marketers that were truly dedicated to optimizing their AdWords efforts, what better way to measure AdWords effectiveness than actual sales revenue?

Since then, it’s been heartening to see Salesforce gradually ramp up its investment in not only the marketing cloud, but also in marketers in general. Dreamforce is now packed with  scores of educational sessions for marketing managers and marketing execs alike. And due to the company’s other marketing acquisitions, it’s easier than ever to make this a reality. Salesforce has acquired a handful of email, marketing automation and social tools, and made investments in many others. So far, there’s been just one step backward in this progression – the company’s discontinuation of SFGA.

The good news is that several third-party solutions have since stepped up to the plate, offering powerful tools to help manage AdWords ROI in Salesforce. In various ways, some of these solutions go far beyond SFGA’s capabilities, even giving marketers insight into how online ads impact offline conversions (sales that close in brick-and-mortar stores and over the telephone).

Here are five great tools that can help marketers truly optimize AdWords ROI in salesforce.com.

CloudAmp – For Web Leads

CloudAmp’s Campaign Tracker for Google AdWords and Analytics offers a solid replacement for SFGA at an amazing price. The solution comes with two prebuilt dashboards, and 19 stock reports. From keyword to click to close, CloudAmp offers online ROI metrics for your AdWords and organic search campaigns. A 15-day free trial enables you to take the product for a test drive.

The company’s founder, David Hecht, says not to sweat Google’s recent announcement that they would no longer be showing search terms in the Adwords referral string. “It is not as bad as it sounds. Advertisers can still see the specific keywords they bid on that triggered an ad, just not the exact keyword phrase a user might have entered in their browser. The one change search engine marketers might consider is using more exact match keywords, and being a bit more cautious with broad match to account for the reduced visibility into search phrases.”

Daddy Analytics – For Web Leads

Daddy Analytics is another fantastic tool for passing web leads from Google AdWords (as well as organic sources) into Salesforce. More than just an AdWords ROI tool, Daddy analytics enables marketers to track ROI from multiple channels. Daddy Analytics delivers a wealth of data to custom fields on a lead’s record in Salesforce, including the lead’s source, what they searched for, which landing page they arrived at, which form they filled out, and their estimated geolocation. Capturing this information automatically enables marketers to keep forms short (thereby increasing conversion rates).

Daddy Analytics’ price includes 8 user licenses (additional licenses are extra) and they offer a free trial.

Pardot – For Web Leads via Marketing Automation

While you would never buy a marketing automation tool like Pardot just for its AdWords Connector, it’s a nice added benefit. To be clear, unlike CloudAmp, the purpose of Pardot’s tool isn’t strictly to pass leads into Salesforce. If you’re looking to do just that, you’re better off with a less expensive tool.

But with Pardot now part of the Salesforce family, however, it’s important to note what it does do – track the behavior of leads acquired through paid search. For example, if someone comes to your site after clicking on a paid search ad, you can then see what other pages they visited and other activities you have Pardot set up to detect. You can also tie cost data from AdWords to opportunity data from Salesforce to determine your true cost per qualified lead and search engine marketing ROI.

But as I mentioned, it’ll cost you. Currently, the connector is only available in Pro and Ultimate Editions.

Bizible – For Web and Brick-and-Mortar Locations

Bizible offers a feature-rich, enterprise-ready AdWords ROI tool for Salesforce users.  Bizibile offers pre-installed reports, as well as opportunities to build custom reports. Bizible also enables marketers to know which organic keywords and social referral sites are driving ROI. It’s great for marketers managing multiple AdWords accounts. One click connects an AdWords account with Salesforce, so it’s easy to ad and remove accounts at will. You can work directly in Salesforce too, so you can manage multiple accounts in one location. Bizible also saves marketers time by completely automating UTM tagging, adding the necessary tags are added to both your ad and keyword-level destination URLs. 

The feature that really sets Bizible apart is its advanced cookie tracking. The product offers a way to track ads that will convert in brick-and-mortar locations. Website visitors are cookied when they click through a site from an ad and are cookied again when they are sent an email after making a purchase. Imagine that you own a guitar shop with an online presence but also a brick-and-mortar store. If a lead clicks through an ad for a Gibson Les Paul, then comes into your store to buy the guitar, you would be able to see, in Salesforce, that the paid search ad was responsible for the offline sale. While I haven’t personally used this feature, it seems like it has the potential to be breakthrough technology for companies that have an offline presence.

Revenue.io – For Inbound Calls (Call Tracking)

So, what about deals that close over the phone? We marketers want to be able to account for everything, don’t we?

We hate to boast, but our call tracking solution for Salesforce has the best Google AdWords integration on the planet. Using a native Google AdWords API, you can provision call tracking numbers that can be associated with any AdWords campaign, ad group or even keyword. The result is that you get real-time insight into which ads drive calls that result in leads, opportunities and revenue. Our solution can work in tandem with any of the previously listed solutions to give you 360-degree visibility into your AdWords ROI. And like the other solutions here, we also offer easy-to-read dashboards and pre-built reports right out of the box.