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With the impending “end-of-life” of Salesforce for Google Adwords, I thought I’d dive a bit deeper into some of the challenges for tracking Google Adwords lead sources into Salesforce. Regardless of whether you choose a tool from the AppExchange or build your own integration, here are some of the considerations that are not always front and center.  

Getting Enough Data

Many companies are running thousands or tens of thousands of keywords in Google Adwords, but only receive tens or hundreds of leads a week. If you don’t have a high lead volume, and a portion of your leads are from sources other than Adwords, it can be a challenge to build up enough data for the results to be meaningful.

For example, your company may find that it has a few keywords with multiple leads, but that the “long tail” exists in your tracking as well — large numbers of keywords with one or two leads. In these environments, it is very common for it to take months to build up enough tracking data for it to be actionable. You will eventually have plenty data, but don’t expect this to come within a month or two, so best to set everyone’s expectations up front.

The best time to start tracking your lead sources was 6 months ago. The second best time is today, so don’t put it off any longer — get lead tracking for Adwords set up today.

Eliminating Waste vs. Optimizing Performing Keywords

Related to the challenge of collecting enough data is what kind of actions you are able to take and when. The reality is often a bit more complicated than the idealized promise of being able to optimize all of your Google Adwords advertising, where every keyword and bid is delivering the perfect balance of revenue without overbidding or waste.

As you are collecting data, you may find that you have a number of keywords with one or two leads attached to them. Are these valuable keywords, or just clicks that became leads by chance? Only time and more data collection will tell, as leads go through the conversion to opportunity and close process so you can relate those click costs to revenue as well.

In the early stages of your Adwords tracking in Salesforce, focus on eliminating waste. The low hanging fruit you can easily take action on without months of data should be keywords that produce tons of clicks with no leads, as well as keywords that produce lots of leads that never convert. This is the waste that is poorly aligned with your products or services, and is the first area where you can confidently make changes based on preliminary data.

Eliminating waste will improve the efficiency of your overall Adwords spend and lower your cost per lead. As you continue to collect tracking data, you can then start to optimize bids, broaden your keywords, or make other optimizations based on more complete data.

Focusing on Wrong Metrics

For me being able to understand revenue / keyword inside Salesforce, instead of relying on CPC or CTR metrics, to be the primary goal of tracking Google Adwords results into Salesforce. Of course, understanding the trends across all of your metrics, CTR and CPC included, is important. But all metrics are not created equal.

How critical revenue / keyword tracking is will vary depending on your business of course. If you only sell one product at a single price, it may not be as important — the sale amount and lifetime value of most customers is the same, so you are mainly optimizing the demand volume side of the equation. But if you have multiple pricepoints that vary significantly, a more expensive click that typically drives a large purchase can be far better than a more affordable click with an average revenue that is lower.

This importance is only multiplied if you are bidding on very competitive keywords. Bidding $25 or even $50 for a single click always seems painful, unless you can track those same clicks through to significant large purchases on a consistent basis. What seems crazy without tracking can be shown to make financial sense and drive significant revenue when properly tracked.

Picking a Source of All Truth

Where do you store your Adwords tracking data? Do you use Salesforce, Google Analytics, or both? What about duplicate / conflicting data?

I am partial to making Salesforce the single source of truth, but of course I build Salesforce applications to centralize data there. Google provides some great tools, especially considering many of them are free / advertising supported, but those systems are not designed to be a long term database, nor are they as customizable as Salesforce is.

One advantage to centralizing Adwords tracking data in Salesforce is that the data can be (potentially) useful to others outside of the marketing department. Sales reps might be interested in what keywords a lead was searching for, to better understand their intent. Or if you don’t want to expose that data to the sales team, you could still use it to drive lead scoring formulas that determine how views are sorted or which leads are visible to the sales team.

A corollary to the “single source of truth” is that to keep yourself sane, you should accept that if you use multiple systems, the numbers in different online tracking systems will never agree exactly. Even the numbers between Google’s different systems don’t match. As with other marketing metrics, it is the trend and the consistency that is more important — as long as the numbers are close enough, focus on any divergence or suddenly larger gap between different analytics systems, as that could indicate a problem.

Poor Lead Hygiene / Salesforce Processes

Another common challenge to tracking Google Adwords (and other online advertising) conversion in Salesforce is poor data quality and a lack of consistently followed processes for handling data. Duplicate leads, no consistency across the sales organization for when leads are converted to opportunities, and custom fields that don’t map anywhere upon conversion are all common issues we see with Salesforce usage that affect campaign tracking.

With so many systems integrated into Salesforce, and marketing automation systems increasingly inserting their own databases into the middle of things, we also see lead sources that get lost or overwritten, and a lack of proper reports / dashboards to give a holistic picture of the data.

If you are embarking on a project to track your Google Adwords or other online marketing leads in Salesforce, try to make data cleanup and process improvements part of the job. You’ll end up with better data and a higher likelihood that you are making decisions based on accurate data as a bonus.

Not Having Correct Tools

Finally, we come to the tools you use to get your Google Adwords data into Salesforce. Some companies have their web developers or engineers build a system to push this data into Salesforce. And if you have an eCommerce system or Account signup (instead of a lead process), custom building a solution may be your only real option unfortunately. But many of us don’t have development resources at our disposal, or the engineering team is too busy on customer-facing product development to work on internal marketing tools.

For those using standard Salesforce web-to-lead forms and processes, there is a new generation of tools available like our (CloudAmp’s) Campaign Tracker. Installable directly from Salesforce.com’s AppExchange, these tools can add in additional information like where a lead came from, what keywords they searched for, and more.

Most importantly, this information becomes a permanent part of the lead record in Salesforce upon the form submit, so you can track those values throughout the lead lifecycle and see conversion and revenue data. Now you can get real ROI data on Google Adwords and your other marketing and advertising efforts, and know in detail which keywords or placements produce your best leads.

Despite the challenges, now is the time. So don’t wait any longer, start tracking your Google Adwords and other advertising lead sources into Salesforce today. Eliminate waste wherever possible, and reallocate funds to the top performing advertising, and your revenue and cost of sales can improve significantly.

Salesforce for Google Adwords launched back in 2007, and for the first time made it easy to associate Adwords advertising data with individual leads inside Salesforce. I was one of the first enthusiastic users and a customer case study for Salesforce on their roadshow announcing the new application.

Finally, we could permanently tie Adwords clicks to an individual lead, and track conversion all the way through from lead to account to closed opportunity. No more focus on Google Adwords CTR, CPC or other important but sometimes misleading metrics. We had arrived at the promised land: $ spent / $ revenue generated on a keyword basis. And we could now get this data even if the lead closed 6 months after the Adwords click and came in via Fax.

Some time ago Salesforce.com announced that the Salesforce for Google Adwords app could no longer be installed, and that support for existing users would be ending May 1, 2013. I don’t know all the details behind this decision, but this blog post is focused on what you can do to replace Salesforce for Google Adwords, and one alternative application that we have developed here at CloudAmp.

CloudAmp’s Campaign Tracker, launched in October 2012, is a viable alternative to Salesforce for Google Analytics. Just install the app into Salesforce, add a tracking code to the pages of your web site and insert some additional code in your web-to-lead forms, and you can start capturing data every time a new lead comes into Salesforce.

Campaign Tracker is designed to be simple, to minimize the number of things that can go wrong in the tracking process. There is no external database to sync to Salesforce, so leads go directly into your Salesforce org via web-to-lead forms, and your data never leaves your Salesforce org. We give you the tracking cookie javascript to host on your own web site, so there no third-party cookies that are often blocked.

In addition, Campaign Tracker does not actually pull any data from Google Adwords or Google Analytics, so we don’t rely on data from those services or the availability of APIs. We simply make use of the Google Analytics Campaign URL format, and save the UTM values from the URL into a cookie that your web site sets.

When a visitor to your web site submits a Salesforce web-to-lead form, we parse the cookie and populate some hidden fields in the form with the campaign values. As a bonus, you have more complete campaign data in Google Analytics, since you should be tagging all of the inbound URLs that you can control.

After you have the tracking enabled on your web site, simply update your Google Adwords URLs in a format like that below, filling in your own values for the campaign etc., and you are ready to go. To make things easier, if you have a lot of ads to update, the Google Adwords editor (a desktop program for your PC or Mac) makes it easy to update many ads quickly.

http://www.YOURSITE.com?utm_source=GoogleAdwords&utm_campaign=CampaignTracker&utm_medium=PPC&utm_term={KeyWord}

The {KeyWord} at the end of the URL uses Google Adword’s keyword insertion to automatically insert the keyword into your URL, just the same way it can insert a keyword into the text of your ad. You can also use the 5th campaign parameter, utm_content, to record the Adgroups if you would like.

That’s it! So if you are looking for an easy to implement alternative to Salesforce for Google Adwords, check out CloudAmp’s Campaign Tracker — it installs directly from the AppExchange for a free trial. If you have any questions, leave a comment below, or contact us and we’ll be glad to help.

I see this truck parked in front of a produce store at 23rd st and Mission a few times a week, and it makes me laugh every time I see it. “Superior Quality, Service & Price, Without Sacrificing Honesty.” What a great, everything and the kitchen sink marketing slogan.

Whoever wrote this slogan sure doesn’t subscribe to the “less is more” school of marketing.

If you have “superior quality, service and price” do you really need honesty? 😉

Today we have access to increasing amounts of data and analytics, from all kinds of systems and applications that were not easily accessible to business users even 5 or 10 years ago.

“Big Data” it is sometimes called, though more because it sounds cool than the actual size of the data in many cases. With all of this data however, understanding the “meaning” of the data is increasingly difficult.

We all need a way to quickly spot trends, and gain actionable insights from all that data that helps us manage the people and processes in our daily work.

One method I have found to be particularly effective in making use of data is having a series of dashboards automatically updated and then emailed to me nightly or weekly. Hourly between midnight and 4 or 5 AM, Salesforce updates my dashboards and emails them to me, graphs and all, to be reviewed while having my morning coffee and cleaning out the inbox.

Getting dashboards emailed to me eliminates the need to remember to log in and check the correct reports, and makes it easy to spot any anomalies or trends early. If I need more information about a graph or chart, clicking on it in my inbox takes me directly to the underlying report in Salesforce.

And having all the data centralized in Salesforce (hopefully) makes it easy for the data to be up-to-date without any human intervention to combine data sources or update spreadsheets.

Some Dashboards I like to see daily:

Website traffic via Google Analytics into Salesforce – how many unique visitors, page views, etc. did I get yesterday and where did they come from? How did that big blog post do? Anything that doesn’t look right? (Yes, I know I can log into Google Analytics and see this high level data plus a whole lot more, but I probably won’t — unless an email dashboard alerts me to something that warrants deeper investigation.)

Registrations via backend database integration – if visitors are signing up on a web site or registering for an account with a SaaS product, I want to push that to Salesforce (within a few minutes ideally), so I can correlate visitors with registrations and have a clear view of the top of my funnel.

Leads via Salesforce’s Web-to-Lead form and other sources – how many inquiries are we receiving, and what is happening to them. This should include lead sources, ideally set by an automated tracking system (and yes I have one that I favor), as well as anything sales reps or marketing people enter into Salesforce clearly identified as such for separation in reporting.

Sales activity via Salesforce – How many calls, emails and other activities are happening, and which reps are performing best. Don’t think of this as big brother or keeping the Sales people honest, but more as understanding your business’ sales productivity. And if you haven’t worked in sales before, you have to witness the data to understand that one Sales rep really can make 5 times more calls than another rep (and generally close 5 times as much business, though not always) even though both reps appear productive anecdotally.

Online Advertising Performance – If you are advertising online, Leads or Registrations with daily graphs broken out by advertising publisher is a particularly useful dashboard. You do need to keep some of those ad networks or blogs honest in terms of the impressions they are running and traffic they are sending you. Plus you will be able to see right away if your conversion tracking code was accidentally left off that new landing page, rather than at the end of the month when the numbers are run and it is too late.

Some Dashboards I like to see weekly:

Usage data – Integrating usage data from SaaS products or other customer behavior or purchasing information into Salesforce accounts is critical for both lead scoring / account ranking, as well as aggregate numbers on how the business is doing overall. I like to see a dashboard that has total usage (or whatever the key metric that shows customer adoption is) across all customers, as well as a list of top accounts, new accounts with high usage, and potential churn accounts whose usage / purchasing has recently dropped off.

Conversion funnel – what are the trends in terms of lead conversion / opportunity creation, and how does the top of the funnel look in terms of volume.

Sales Pipeline – what Salesforce Opportunities are open, if there are free trials which are expiring in the next week or two, how many deals are at each stage, and is anything neglected or staying open forever without movement?

Revenue – If you have a billing or other financial system integrated into Salesforce, it is nice to have some revenue dashboards as well. It isn’t a substitute for financial reporting (and won’t make the accountants happy), but can help you see total revenue, new sales, and understand some high level financial trends, even if it isn’t accurate to the penny.

By reviewing daily or weekly dashboards emailed from Salesforce, you can start each day with a quick overview of your business, and an easy opportunity to understand any trends and spot problem areas or successes. In addition, building these dashboards will ensure that you have all or most of the data that you need in Salesforce for other people to use, so it can make the chances of success much greater if you are just rolling out Salesforce CRM.

You may need to dive back into any one of a number of systems to see further details in the data, or use more sophisticated analytical tools to understand the correlations between different data sets. But ultimately having the data summarized, automatically updated and emailed to you in dashboards is a great way to stay on top of the top line numbers and trends in your business.

How are you using dashboards, and do you get them via Email? Let me know in the comments below.

Today we are proud to announce that CloudAmp’s first application for Salesforce, the Google Analytics Campaign Tracker, has gone live on Salesforce.com’s AppExchange.

CloudAmp’s Google Analytics Campaign Tracker lets you know exactly which campaigns and sources are producing your leads. It is designed to capture data from the familiar Google Analytics Campaign URLs  into Salesforce via Web-to-Lead forms, so you can know which leads resulted from which advertising campaigns or web site referrals.

If you tag banners, search engine campaigns, email newsletters or links on external websites with Google Analytics Campaign URLs, when visitors click on those tracked items they arrive on your web site with a referral URL that contains those parameters (utm_campaign=, utm_medium= etc.). Now with the Google Analytics Campaign Tracker, you can capture those values into Salesforce when that visitor submits a web-to-lead form, and forever know how you got that lead.

The Google Analytics Campaign Tracker also contains a dashboard and a number of reports, for a turnkey way of analyzing your data once you start collecting it.

Try CloudAmp’s  Campaign Tracker today, free for 15 days. We’ll even help you get it set up and tested.

This is the first in an occasional series of my favorite sales and marketing tips for startups and SMBs. Enjoy! –David

One easy and effective marketing best practice is to send out a personalized welcome email about a week after customers sign up for your application or service. Ideally this should be a personal note from one of the founders, short with no sales pitch — more of a “checking in / introducing myself” email. And Salesforce makes it easy to do .

The idea is for this email to be much less formal than the typical welcome emails / autoresponders that go out right after signup, and which contain lots of information and links. It should be signed by one of the founders or an executive whenever possible (a Sales or Marketing title will decrease response, depending on the type of customer base), and should contain as much personal contact information as you feel comfortable giving out.

Example:

Hello {!Contact.FirstName}

I just wanted to follow up with you personally, and make sure you were having a good experience using [Product].

Please let me know if I can provide you with a demo, connect you with anyone on our support team, or help in any way. My contact details are below.

Best,

John Smith
Co-Founder
[email protected]
415-MY-MOBILE

This may seem silly or to be a waste of time, but there are a variety of reasons why it is worthwhile.

• Additional Touchpoint. Some people will realize this is a form email, but it seems less automated than the system emails people get when they signup. This perception will vary quite a bit depending on your target customers, of course (technical people are very different from marketers, B2B very different than B2C). But in general it is a good excuse to reach out to customers which few will object to, and you may get more responses than you would think (it is easy for someone to dash off a quick response to a seemingly personal email).
• Identify serious customers. Many customers will appreciate getting the personal contact information of a founder or principal, or really anyone at the company, especially in B2B products where having an actual person (or a person beyond a sales rep) could be beneficial to them as they become a serious customer. They may respond to the email, allowing you to further identify them as qualified.
• Identify unqualified customers. Sometimes people will respond with “your product sucks” or “take me off your list.” Never discount the value of a NO, it helps you get to those who will buy that much faster. Just make sure you update their customer records as unqualified / email opt-out in Salesforce.
• Identify misconceptions. A few customers will respond with a variation of “I like your product, but I am not going to use it because it does not do X.” When in fact your product does do X, or maybe there is a workaround, or maybe you are coming out with that feature next week. Good to know.
• Gather additional data. Not everyone will like this one, but when people reply often additional information is available in their email signature, or their gmail address forwarded to a corporate email address that they reply from. Since so many signup processes for web apps these days are trying to be ultra-low friction, requiring just email address and password or less, I like having someone enter this information into Salesforce whenever you can.

When and How to Send

I recommend sending these emails once a week to everyone who signed up in the past week, using the Salesforce “Mass Email” feature (available in Professional Edition or above). After some initial setup, it is a fairly quick process to do it every week.

Salesforce makes it easy to send out the emails, you don’t have to pull lists into an external system, and best of all you can also remove recipients who are already corresponding with a sales rep or other person at your company (filter out based on last activity or visual inspection).

First, create an email template similar to the one above, or create your own to match the positioning and voice of your business. In Salesforce, go to

Setup > Email > My Templates > New Template

Create a new template, add any merge fields you want (I prefer first name with a Hello greeting and no punctuation, so if there is no value in the customer record it doesn’t seem awkward like “Dear”). Be sure to check the box that makes the template available for use.

Second, go to the Contacts tab and scroll down to

Tools > Mass Email

at the bottom right (Assuming you are importing all signups as Accounts, otherwise go to the Leads tab).

ou have to create custom views of recipients for a mass email, but each week you can then click “edit”, update the dates, and “Save as” to get a view for the new batch. In the example below, I am selecting accounts that were created in a single week, and then using the filter logic to also select accounts that either have no activity (no calls/emails recorded on the account), or at least that haven’t had activities in the last day (“last activity less than yesterday” in Salesforce-speak).

You should adjust those values to match your follow up and how often you want to contact customers, and you can also add in additional filter criteria (such as Account Type or custom fields that segment your customers such as Plan or product type).

Once you have saved as, you will see a list of customer emails. If you would like, you can manually scroll through them and uncheck any contacts that you don’t want to receive the email. Click next and select your email template, then next and select your settings for when to send the email. I recommend selecting “Store an activity for each message” so anyone looking at the contact later will see that they received the email. You can also choose whether to “Use My Signature” that is in the email setup, or include a custom signature as part of the template.

Click send, and wait for the response.

Then set a calendar reminder, and in one week change the date fields on the view, save as, and you’ll be ready to go all over again.

Caveat: If you are getting more than 500 customers a week, you will need to do this more frequently (Salesforce limits mass email to 500 per day). A lot more than 500 and you probably can’t use Salesforce efficiently for this, so use whatever external system you use for newsletters and other large email volume (Mailgun, SendGrid, MailChimp, ExactTarget, etc.)

But I already get too much email

I’ll leave you with a final tip I’ve seen some startups employ to deal with this, and it is a clever hack that should work for awhile. If you are worried as a founder about getting more email in an inbox already filled with critical emails from customers, partners, and investors, you can set up an alternate but plausible email address. For example, if [email protected] is your primary address, you can set up [email protected] as an alias that goes to a separate box, or even an alias that goes to you and a Sales person who is tasked with responding to customer inquiries.

Then filter email to [email protected] so it doesn’t go into your inbox, and only reply personally when you need to. You are just lending your name and credibility to the email — if you can follow up to responses personally that is great, but if not, it generally is not a big deal as long as someone responds.

CloudAmp provides Customer Analytics for SaaS companies, directly inside of Salesforce CRM. If you have a trial or free plan, we can show you who your best leads are based on their real-time usage.

You launched your new App. Hundreds, maybe even thousands of people signed up for a trial or free plan.

Congratulations. Now what?

When you had a few beta users, you could communicate individually with them, and have a pretty good idea about how everyone was using your product. Now you are looking at a huge list of anonymous customers, and wondering where to start.

If yours is like most companies, you push your sales team (or yourself in an early-stage startup) to manually review more accounts, and do more introductory emails and phone calls.

Or marketing establishes a timeline of how customers would normally start using your product, and sends out mass emails based on their best guess of where customers should statistically be in that process, based on when they signed up.

Ok. But can’t we do better?

What if you could see exactly how each individual customer was using your app, directly within your CRM system? And what if all of their contact information, account information, and usage metrics updated in real-time?

Then you could know exactly where each customer was in the freemium funnel.

Who had signed up, who has started using the product. Which customers were using the product in a way that they were likely to stay on the free plan forever. Which customers are starting to use the product in a way that indicates they should upgrade to paid, and which ones are stopping or decreasing their usage.