CloudAmp vs Other Solutions: Why Salesforce Native Lead Attribution?

August 14, 2024 by David Hecht

 

There are a number of marketing applications that can capture ad campaign sources and utm parameters. So why choose CloudAmp?

CloudAmp expands the Salesforce Customer 360 by providing campaign data right in Sales cloud, giving you a more complete view of your customer. See how leads arrived at your website, what pages they viewed, and more.

More importantly, CloudAmp is one of the only solutions that is native to Salesforce, and 100% focused on Salesforce customers and functionality. What does this mean in practice? 

 

Built 100% on the Salesforce Platform

CloudAmp is built and runs 100% on the Salesforce platform. It is a native application, with no infrastructure outside of Salesforce.

Why does “native” matter? While it may seem like a minor distinction, it really separates Salesforce apps into two distinct groups — native ones built on top of the Salesforce platform, and external apps that connect to Salesforce, but are mainly running outside of Salesforce’s infrastructure.

Secure

Built 100% on Salesforce means the CloudAmp application lives entirely inside of your Salesforce Org once you install it. There is an external script that runs on your website to help capture tracking information for your forms that submit leads into Salesforce. But everything that processes and stores data runs inside your Salesforce org, and has passed the rigorous Salesforce security review (more on that below).

 

Focus

Native also means that the CloudAmp design philosophy is 100% focused on Salesforce. Rather than have an external application, where selected data is pulled into a section within Salesforce, CloudAmp is tightly coupled to the Salesforce data model and functionality. We only build applications for Salesforce, so Salesforce is our exclusive focus.

 

CloudAmp custom fields are added right to your Leads, Contacts, and Opportunities, where your team is already working. The Visitor Sessions custom object, which shows which pages a lead visited on your website, is tightly connected via a related list.

 

Familiarity

Prebuilt reports and dashboards are there for you to easily visualize your data and customize as needed, using the Salesforce reporting tools you are familiar with. The entire application takes advantage of familiarity with Salesforce, rather than requiring your team to learn a new interface. This speeds your time to implementation, and can increase your user adoption rate as well.

 

Easy Access

Finally, being built 100% on the Salesforce platform means no integration hassles. All of your marketing attribution data is right in Salesforce with CloudAmp, where it can be easily connected to other tools you use within Salesforce — Campaigns, email tools, sales pipeline reporting, and more. This makes access easier for your team, which means the CloudAmp tools are easier to use, and ultimately helps increase sales deal velocity.

 

There is also no need to connect external solutions, with the related integration costs and potential for mapping issues or service interruptions. You get the reliable uptime that Salesforce delivers, with less potential for performance issues. You also benefit from Salesforce’s strong data security, which leads into our next topic.

 

Your Data Stays in Your Control

Many marketing applications are built independently of Salesforce, so they can connect with different CRM platforms. These types of Web applications can be convenient, but by their nature they need to store your data in their own databases in order to process and display it. 

 

While this is generally fine, it does create risk in several areas, including risk of 3rd party data breaches, and compliance issues around data processing and privacy.

 

No Intermediaries

With CloudAmp, your data goes directly from your web site to your Salesforce account, with no servers or storage in the middle. Your data is kept completely private, with no access granted to external parties. You are in complete control of how your data is managed and shared, just like with any other data stored securely in Salesforce.

 

As an application built 100% on the Salesforce platform, all of the data processing happens inside your Salesforce account, where the CloudAmp app acts as a plugin. Once the data has been captured from your website to Salesforce, it never leaves your Salesforce account and is never transferred to any external servers.

 

With this architecture, it is able to manage critical marketing attribution data without having access to it outside of your secure Salesforce account. CloudAmp does not have any of its own servers, and we do not have access to your data at any point.

 

Salesforce Security Review Process

All applications on the Salesforce AppExchange are subject to Salesforce’s rigorous security review process. This review happens before an application can first be listed on the AppExchange, as well as every 1-2 years as required by Salesforce’s periodic re-review process.

 

The goal of the security review is to ensure that AppExchange apps conform to security best practices, and protect customer data in a similar manner to Salesforce. To this end, the Salesforce security review teams attempt to penetrate the defenses of the application based on common web vulnerabilities.

 

Their goal is to extract or modify data that they don’t have permission to access, including via SOQL and SQL injection attacks, cross-site scripting, and nonsecure authentication and access control protocols. In addition, they also test for vulnerabilities specific to the Salesforce platform, such as record-sharing violations.

 

Thorough Security Vetting

If any security vulnerabilities are found during the review, a report is produced, and Salesforce technical resources are available to help address any issues. This process frequently goes through multiple rounds of security reviews and revisions, enabling Salesforce partners to fine-tune the security of their applications. Applications cannot go live on the AppExchange until they pass the review process.

 

All of this is to say that when you choose an application like CloudAmp, it has been vetted and reviewed by the Salesforce security review team. While no software can be 100% secure, this process gives you the peace of mind that it has been reviewed and revised according to Salesforce’s high security standards. Software outside of the Salesforce ecosystem is unlikely to have gone through this type of security check.

 

Salesforce Best Practices Expertise

Finally, companies like CloudAmp, which are built 100% on the Salesforce platform, and sell exclusively to Salesforce customers are in a position to help you be successful with Salesforce more generally.

 

We are Salesforce Experts with decades of experience, and so can help you understand how your marketing attribution and advertising data can fit into the larger Salesforce ecosystem. We can advise on best practices around lead conversion, how to manage Opportunities, other Salesforce apps that can provide additional marketing insight, pluses and minuses of different form technologies, using Salesforce automation to update campaigns, and more.

 

All this means you’ll be able to more quickly use that data to accelerate your sales process and close deals faster, which is the main purpose of Salesforce.

 

Get More from Your Salesforce Investment

CloudAmp extends Salesforce’s capabilities, and makes your investment in Salesforce better. 

 

Other solutions may have some support team members who are familiar with Salesforce, but for most companies it is just another integration they are required to have (albeit a popular one). 

 

CloudAmp makes your life easier as a marketing or sales ops professional, by giving you the data you need to improve your advertising. But we can go beyond that to help you understand where else in Salesforce you might be able to take action based on that data. And we know many of the other tools and features that you might take advantage of to be more effective with your Salesforce investment.

 

Learn more about CloudAmp

Not yet a CloudAmp customer? If you want to have more data about your Leads in Salesforce, including full source attribution and page view data to prove ROI and improve your marketing, contact us for more information today.

 
 

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