Stop Wasting Money on Google Ads: Use Salesforce + 3 Other Tips

Posted on December 19, 2024December 19, 2024 by David Hecht

Google Ads is an amazing tool to drive targeted leads and sales. You can get in front of your prospects right when they are searching for something they want to purchase, and target ads precisely to the search terms which are most relevant to your product and ideal customer profile (ICP).

But Google Ads also makes it easy to spend (and potentially waste) large amounts of your marketing budget very quickly, if things are not set up correctly.

For advertisers using Salesforce, you have the opportunity to track offline conversions, even those sales that happen long after the ad click.

Here are 2 ways to use Salesforce to improve your Google Ads ROI, as well as 3 other tips to eliminate wasted spend and get more out of your Google ad budget.

Identify Keywords that Produce Leads but no Sales
Connect Salesforce and Google Ads
Move Some Budget to Bing
Practice good Google Ads Hygiene
Great Landing Pages

1. Identify Keywords that Produce Leads but no Sales

For most Google advertisers using Salesforce, the “low hanging fruit” in eliminating wasted ad spend is understanding the following:

Which keywords produce lots of leads, but don’t convert to sales?

Often there are keywords that may seem relevant to your product or service, but actually attract people who are looking for something else. Or they are just not the keywords that serious buyers are going to be using. Some keywords might be more related to research or students studying a topic than prospects looking for a solution to buy.

This is especially true for B2B companies, where certain keywords may be used by consumers in a different context, or have an altogether different meaning.

By capturing campaign and keyword information in your Salesforce leads, using a tool like CloudAmp’s Campaign Tracker or your own developers’ website form code, you can begin to analyze which keywords produce leads that convert to opportunities, and which don’t.

By being able to track offline conversions in Salesforce, you can attribute sales back to specific keywords and ads. This will enable you to understand campaign ROI, as well as be able to see buyer intent more quickly via the data contained in your new Salesforce leads (e.g. what a lead searched for, and what web pages they viewed).

Once you have enough data in Salesforce, and time has elapsed for your typical sales cycle to run through a few times, take the following actions:

Analyze your Salesforce leads from Google Ads by keyword
Which keywords produced leads that converted to opportunities?
Are there keywords that produced leads that did not convert?
Pause or change bids on low conversion keywords
Reallocate budget from low conversion to high conversion keywords

2. Connect Salesforce and Google Ads

You can also pass Salesforce data back to Google Ads as Conversion Goals, to be used in certain types of campaign optimization.

In order to pass data back to Google Ads from Salesforce, you’ll need to be capturing the Google Click ID (Gclid) value into your Salesforce leads. You can do that with the CloudAmp’s Campaign Tracker or your own developers’ website form code. The Gclid value is a parameter that Google automatically adds to every ad click URL.

Once you have that Gclid in your Salesforce leads, you can use Google’s data import tool to bring lead conversions, as well as Opportunities at any stage (including Closed Won / Closed Lost) back into Google as Conversion Goals.

Conversion Goals such as converted leads, or even closed won deals, are far stronger indicators of success than the typical metrics Google uses for optimization (click through rates (CTR), Impressions, Form Submits, etc.)

Google imports the data from Salesforce on a daily basis, so it will know the exact campaign, keyword, ad creative and click that resulted in your original Salesforce lead, since that is tied to the unique Gclid value.

For more information about connecting Salesforce and Google Ads, see our complete guide on How to Connect Salesforce and Google Ads

3. Move Some Budget to Bing

Switching gears to non-Salesforce tips, another way to be more efficient outside of tracking your results in Salesforce is to spread some search budget to another search engine.

While Microsoft’s Bing search engine only has 4% global market share compared to Google’s 90% (November 2024 stats), that percentage increases to 11.5% for desktop computers, and 15% of desktop computers in the United States (Bing’s mobile usage is almost nonexistent).

That means for B2B advertisers targeting certain industries, or B2C advertisers targeting prospects who are more likely to search on Desktop computers, Bing can be very efficient.

Lower cost per click than Google
Import Google Campaigns and keywords automatically for quick setup
15% of US desktop computer traffic
Microsoft Ads run on Bing, AOL, Yahoo, and partner sites like MSN.com

Exactly how much lower cost Bing is than Google will depend on your keywords, though estimates range from 30 – 70%. The point is that fewer advertisers means less competition for clicks, as CPC bids are an auction among advertisers. A lot of advertisers ignore Microsoft Ads / Bing, when they should at least do a test.

Check your web analytics tool, such as Google Analytics, to understand what percentage of your current website traffic is desktop vs. mobile.

If the majority of your traffic is from desktops, then Bing is certainly worth a slice of your budget to test. And if you can drive leads at a lower cost per lead, that increases your overall search advertising efficiency.

4. Practice good Google Ads Hygiene

We’d be remiss if we didn’t remind you of some of the best ways to make sure your ads are not getting wasted clicks on the Google Ads side. While you will find more extensive guides to practicing good Google Ads hygiene elsewhere on the web, our top recommendations include the following:

1. Separate Campaigns for SeparateTactics.
If you are going to run on Google’s Display network, be sure to set up separate campaigns for display ads. That way you can compare performance of Search Campaigns running only on the Google Search Network, and Display Campaigns running only on the Google Display Network, without the targeting being mixed in a single campaign. Enabling both in a single campaign makes analysis more difficult.

The same goes for ad formats — while you can run multiple kinds of ads from the same Campaign for certain ad types, it is generally better to separate things into different Campaigns to more easily evaluate performance.

Finally, advertisers who are new to Google Ads should probably start with Search Campaigns, only on Google’s Search Network, with carefully selected phrase or exact match keywords. Even though Demand Gen, Performance Max or Smart campaigns sound great, they are less targeted and can burn through a lot of your budget, so you can experiment with them after the basics of Google Ads are working well for you.

2. Utilize Negative Keywords.
Negative keywords are a powerful tool to prevent irrelevant queries from triggering your ads. You should regularly review your search terms report by clicking on:

>> Campaigns , Insights and reports, and then Search terms.

By understanding the specific terms people used in Google Search that caused your ads to show, you can find search terms where you would not want your ads to appear, and add them as negative keywords to that Campaign or at the Account level.

In addition to being a critical strategy for eliminating waste in your Google Ads, reviewing search terms can give you ideas for content marketing on your website, plus it is generally pretty interesting to see what your buyers are actually searching for!

3. Review Keyword Match Types
Some of the complexity of Google Ads are the different match types—broad, phrase, or exact—that control how closely search queries must align with your keywords. Be careful in your use of match types, as errors can lead to your ads appearing for irrelevant searches, wasting your budget.

Broad match types, Google’s default, can be particularly problematic for casting a wider net than some advertisers may want (depending on your product and target market). Broad shows your ads to users searching for “related” topics, while phrase match has to have the keywords somewhere, and exact match specifies the order of the keywords.

Our recommendation is to start with phrase and exact match only, then expand to trying broad match as you want to broaden your audience.

4. Refine Location Targeting
Unless you are selling your products or services globally, you should only be showing your ads in geographic areas that are relevant to your business. Misconfigured location settings can result in clicks from regions you don’t serve, leading to unnecessary costs.

5. Implement Ad Scheduling
Analyze when your target audience is most active and schedule your ads to run during these peak times. This approach can prevent you from spending on clicks during off-hours that have lower conversion rates.

5. Great Landing Pages

Finally, once you have your Google Ads organized and are limiting match types and keywords to the most relevant to your business, don’t throw away all your hard work by sending visitors to a standard contact us page (or worse, your home page).

People tend to have very short attention spans, especially on the Internet when they are confronted with unlimited choice and sometimes confusing or misleading results. Make sure they land on a page on your website that clearly tells them they have arrived at the correct place.

A good advertising landing page specification could fill multiple blog posts, but the best ones have some common characteristics:

Headline that echoes what the visitor searched for
Let the visitor know they’ve arrived at the right website
Strong, benefits-oriented copy
Overcome objections or reasons to click away
Testimonials, awards and other social proof
Clear call to action (next step the visitor should take)

In conclusion, while it is easy to waste money using Google Ads, you should not let that discourage you from taking advantage of its incredible reach and market dominance to drive more leads to your business.

By capturing keyword and campaign data into Salesforce, sending it back to Google for optimization, and carefully applying the account management strategies described above, you can improve the performance of your Google Ads campaigns and ensure your budget is utilized effectively.

Learn more about CloudAmp

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

CloudAmp also provides hands-on Google Ads and Salesforce integration assistance, included with some app subscriptions. We are always happy to answer questions free of charge, so don’t hesitate to reach out.

Manage Your Lead and Customer Data Right from the Start

Posted on October 1, 2024October 29, 2024 by David Hecht

With all of the tasks that go into starting a business, it is easy to forget about properly collecting customer data correctly from the beginning.

Life in a startup business is hectic, after all, with thousands of tasks vying for your attention — everything from critical things like delivering your product or service to operational responsibilities like hiring, bookkeeping and vendor management.

And since you don’t have a lot of customers and prospects in the beginning, keeping them organized often falls by the wayside -– similarly to the way some startups fail to establish a solid financial model because they don’t expect to have much revenue in the beginning.

Lead Management Basics

Resist the Spreadsheet Temptation

Connect Forms to a Database

Publish Email Addresses with Caution

Use a CRM System

Integrate with Other Tools

Capture Lead Marketing Data

Data Security is Important

Data Hygiene Bonus Points

Copy and Paste, Don’t Type

Standardize Data Formats

Avoid Placeholder Data

Train and monitor your SDRs

Clean your Data

What I have seen many times, and suffered through personally at least once, is that if you don’t take time to establish some sound data collection and lead management practices up front, you may not get around to it until it really becomes a problem for your business. By that time, you could have lots of neglected leads and ignored, angry customers (or maybe no customers).

If you think these suggestions may not apply to your cool “viral” consumer startup that is the next Facebook or Uber for Dog Walkers, well, you could be right if you are really lucky.

However, you can still use these guidelines to organize data on partners, advisors, investors, etc. For the 99.9% of businesses that will need to actively sell to prospects and customers, however, these guidelines are important!

Lead Management Basics

Resist the Spreadsheet Temptation

If you must use Excel or Google Sheets for customer or lead data, be sure to do it with a vision for the future. We all do this sometimes, but a little structure and preparation can save time and headaches.

Think about what data you might want later, and keep it clean with clearly labeled, consistent columns that each contain one type of data only. That way you can easily import it into a CRM system later, without further data entry or cleanup. The relatively new pre-built Tables options in Google Sheets can help you get started on the right path, since they have validation and smart chips built in.

Keep in mind that your use of spreadsheets should only be used very temporarily though, as they are “flat files” — you cannot easily have different records related to a line in a spreadsheet, so keeping track of emails, phone call logs, or other activity is difficult. For managing communications, you really need a CRM system.

Connect Forms to a Database

Make sure contact forms on your web site are going into a database of some sort (like a CRM system below). It is amazing how many companies do not respond to inquiries through their web site forms, despite this being effectively the same as throwing away money you spent on your website and marketing.

If you have a contact form that just sends an email to someone, it is easy to see how it might get lost (or worse yet ignored, hoarded by a sales rep who is too busy to respond but doesn’t want to share, etc.). And any lead database should easily be accessed by the people who need to follow up with leads (not hidden in your website’s back end system).

Publish Email Addresses with Caution

Email addresses on websites can be ok, but know what you are getting into. Putting an email address on your contact us page goes against much of the advice here around databases / CRM systems, but it can make for a more personalized touch. Just expect to get a lot of spam at that address, and be prepared to triage more uncategorized inquiries.

Public email addresses can be helpful for certain audiences who don’t like filling out forms, or for marketing purposes (e.g. “contact [email protected]”.) Just be sure that you are prepared to deal with these emails, and have clear expectations around who will answer these emails and how they will be handled.

A best practice is to enable a tool like email-to-case, a Salesforce feature that can receive emails and create cases from them automatically. With that type of technology, each email logs a case or ticket in Salesforce, so nothing falls through the cracks. Customers can conveniently just pop you an email, but on the CRM backend a record gets created in a similar way to a form (with less structured data so some cleanup may be required).

Use a CRM System

Use a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system as early as possible. Waiting too long leads to disorganization and missed opportunities.

Of course we recommend Salesforce.com, though there are plenty of other options. CRM systems can be expensive for an early stage business, but they do wonders for your business in terms of centralizing and organizing data.

You can make your forms enter data directly into Salesforce via it’s web-to-lead feature, eliminating data getting lost in someone’s email. See our Ultimate Guide to Salesforce Web-to-Lead Forms post for an in-depth discussion.

Once the data is in a CRM system, it is also much easier to begin to define processes for following up with and managing the relationship with those customers or leads (hence the name CRM, customer relationship management), and some of this can even be automated through autoresponders, automation rules, etc. Plus systems like Salesforce scale with your business regardless of how quickly you grow, offering features for almost every future need.

Finally, if you can convince everyone to use a central CRM system, you get a more complete picture of trends with leads and customers instead of having to ask around to different sales representatives, consultants, etc. This is valuable even if everyone is in the same room, but is more important with many businesses today that have remote, distributed teams.

Integrate with Other Tools

Another reason to begin using a CRM system like Salesforce is that you can integrate your CRM with marketing, sales, and customer service tools to have a seamless flow of data.

Using disconnected tools without integrating them can lead to siloed data, more manual work, and inefficiency. To track your customer journey correctly, you need to be able to see what your customer is doing through multiple channels, from marketing to customer service.

Plus from a practical perspective, not having your tools connected together can make it difficult to do things like keep your email marketing lists up to date with the latest leads, or provide timely assistance to new customers during their onboarding process.

Capture Lead Marketing Data

One type of CRM integration are attribution tools, which can capture marketing data into Salesforce. You can see precise lead paths — how a visitor arrived at your website, the keywords they searched for, and what ad campaign they responded to.

Using an app like our CloudAmp Campaign Tracker, you can see all of the information about how your leads found you. Know which sources, campaigns, and content drove each particular lead, so you can understand marketing ROI as your leads convert to sales.

In addition, you can see which pages on your website a lead visited before they submitted a web form. This information can often be useful to understand buyer intent or product interest.

Data Security is Important

Ensuring the protection of you and your customers’ sensitive information is critical, though it may seem like a luxury to focus on when you are trying to launch a business. As you grow, data breaches can become a big risk. And you will need to make sure you comply with data privacy laws (GDPR, CCPA), especially if you are dealing with consumers.

One important benefit of using a CRM system recommended above is data security — encryption, password protection, and not emailing around spreadsheets. Plus using a CRM system forces you to begin to define who can access or modify data, to ensure accountability but also prevent unauthorized access or changes.

Data Hygiene Bonus Points

Copy and Paste, Don’t Type

Train your team to copy / paste instead of doing data entry. I don’t want to sound like a high school grammar teacher, but making sure people get into the habit of copying and pasting data from emails or websites, instead of retyping, is critical, especially when it comes to email addresses.

Typos with gmail rarely bounce to let you know you typed it wrong, one of the other 1.8 billion users with a similar address gets your email and just deletes your proposal since they have never heard of you.

There are a variety of extraction tools which can automate data entry from email signatures and websites these days, which is even better than copy and paste. And if you follow the earlier recommendation to connect your forms to a database, you shouldn’t need to do much data entry, because most of your contacts will already be in your CRM system.

Standardize Data Formats

Establish standards for your team about how names, phone numbers, and other common information should be formatted to improve the quality of your data. Automated tools can make sure CA, Calif, and California all get rewritten to CA, but other bad data can live forever.

Bad data can hinder retrieval and analysis, and require a lot of wasted time on manual cleanup to make reports and dashboards look correct. And data cleansing tools can only do so much.

Avoid Placeholder Data

Related to standardizing formats, your team should not put anything in your database that does not belong. If your team isn’t capturing data for required fields, so they are entering BS to be able to save records, review the process to either help them get the required information, or consider making a field not required.

As you grow, the notes that you put in a field where they didn’t belong (“customer is a real cheapskate”) or substitutes for information you did not know (last name = “don’t know”) will come back to bite you.

When you are larger and have so much data that you can’t easily manually review it for accuracy, your IT department will magically enable customers to update their data in an account portal (like Salesforce’s great Experience Cloud). The “cheapskate” may see those notes that were not in a private notes field and be unhappy. Or your marketing department may send out beautiful, personalized email newsletters addressed to “Dear Bob Don’t Know.” Keep your database clean.

Train and monitor your SDRs

If your company has Sales Development Representatives (SDRs) or Business Development Representatives (BDRs), or any type of inside sales representatives who are responsible for qualifying leads, be sure to train them on these data hygiene standards. In many organizations, they are the front lines of handling incoming leads in Salesforce.

So in addition to your typical measurement of how many emails, calls and scheduled meetings these sales reps are handling, you should not just establish data policies but also monitor how they are processing lead data.

Are they converting leads from existing customers correctly?
Are they deduping records (if you are not using automated tools for this)?
How are they handling leads or contacts who are no longer at a company?
Are they following standards for updating or correcting data?
If they have delete permissions, are the deleting things that should be deleted?

Ensuring that your team who interacts the most with leads and customers is helping to clean the data, rather than ignoring your policies or worse polluting your database can be vital to building good data quality over time.

Clean your Data

Last but not least, you should conduct regular data cleanups of your database or CRM. Duplicates, inaccuracies, or irrelevant data are inevitable in any database, and generally become worse over time.

Failure to periodically update and dedupe your data can lead to inefficiencies, and make it harder to extract insights through your reports. And from a marketing perspective, outdated and duplicate data leads to poor targeting, and wasting resources on dead or unqualified leads.

A few common techniques for cleaning data include:

Lead and Contact Deduplication tools for Salesforce
Having a clear policy about how to update records who have changed jobs
Syncing hard bounce / unsubscribe data from your email marketing system back to Salesforce

Improve Lead Quality with Google, Microsoft, or Facebook Ad click IDs

Posted on July 3, 2024October 29, 2024 by David Hecht

How to optimize your lead gen advertising with gclid, msclkid, and fbclid data in Salesforce Leads.

You may be familiar with advertising click IDs (such as Gclid, Msclkid, and Fbclid) that are generated when users click on your ads on platforms like Google, Microsoft, and Facebook, respectively.

But are you using these ad click ID values to track and optimize your online advertising?

You can even connect a click ID to a specific Lead it generated in Salesforce, to finally understand which specific ads and targeting resulted in later offline conversions and sales.

In this article, we are going to do a deep dive on ad click IDs: what they are, how to enable them in your advertising settings, how to capture them in Salesforce, and ways you can use them to improve your marketing results.

What are Ad Click IDs?
How to Enable Google Click IDs (gclid)
How to Enable Microsoft Click IDs (msclkid)
How to Enable Facebook Click IDs (fbclid)
Capturing Ad Click IDs in Your Salesforce Leads
Using Click IDs in Salesforce Leads to Optimize Ads

What are Ad Click IDs?

Advertising click IDs are parameters that are automatically added to your ad URLs by online advertising platforms such as Google Ads, Microsoft Adcenter, and Facebook / Instagram. You may also hear them referred to as tags.

For example, you will see Google add a value to the end of your landing page URLs (the links to your website from Google ads), such as:

https://yoursite.com/?gclid=EAIaIQobChNIrqW8rcCYgAMVioKGCh10JA9GEYAYASAAEgI1CfD_BwE

In the link above, the tag or parameter added (gclid=) is the Google click ID or Gclid for short. And the value that Google automatically assigned to it, EAIaIQobChNIrqW8rcCYgAMVioKGCh10JA9GEYAYASAAEgI1CfD_BwE, is the unique code that identifies a user clicking on your ad.

Note that you cannot control or reuse these id values in your links, they are automatically added by the advertising platforms to identify a user’s click on your ad.

Why Do Ad Clicks Matter?

What is the value of understanding ad clicks, aside from improving your general knowledge of how one part of online ad tracking works?

Because Ad clicks help identify a particular interaction with your advertising. In the case of Google’s Gclid, it helps attribute a conversion to a specific campaign, ad group, keyword, and individual ad. It is a record of what happened that can be used to improve your advertising campaigns, and prove the return on investment (ROI) of particular marketing efforts.

With advertising IDs you can see which campaigns are driving the most conversions, as well as have a way of tagging the individual conversions themselves, so you can see when they produce sales in Salesforce.

How to Enable Google Click IDs (gclid)

To add Google Click IDs (gclids) to your Google Ad links, simply ensure a feature called auto-tagging is enabled. Log into your Google Ads account, and check the following:

Click the Admin gear from the left side menu
Click the Account Settings tab
Click the Auto-tagging section
Select “Tag the URL that people click through from my ad.”
Click Save

Google Auto-Tagging Considerations

Auto-tagging is simple to enable, but keep in mind that gclids can be up to 100 characters long. So ensure that your website and any redirects can handle a tag value of that length. When in doubt, check with your web developer and run some tests.

A number of years back there were also issues with enabling auto-tagging when you also had manual tags in your URLs (like utm_campaign, or content parameters unique to your website). There were issues with duplicate tracking data from combining both methods, but these have been fixed by Google.

Today many marketers combine both Google auto-tagging and manual UTM tags, since manual UTM parameters are required for systems like CloudAmp to capture data into Salesforce, and provide a way of better structuring your tracking data.

If you have Google Ads connected to Google Analytics, analytics will use the gclids to pull information about the visitor who clicked on your ad. There is even a setting on the Google Analytics side to “Allow manual tagging (UTM values) to override auto-tagging (GCLID values)”

How to Enable Microsoft Click IDs (msclkid)

Microsoft Advertising (formerly Bing Ads) uses the Microsoft Click ID (MSCLKID) to track user activity via the UET tag on your website. (Note there is a K in msclkid, unlike the Google gclid and Facebook fbclid tags).

Microsoft Ads are considered a more affordable option compared to Google Ads, so many marketers run similar campaigns on both platforms to maximize traffic and leads.

From the left side menu, select All campaigns > Settings > Account level options.
1. Or in the new navigation, hover over Campaigns and select Settings > Account level options.
Check the Add Microsoft Click ID (MSCLKID) to URLs to allow conversion tracking checkbox.
Click Save.

Universal Event Tracking (UET) is the tag on your website that records what customers do, and relays the data back to Microsoft Advertising for conversion tracking, automated bidding features, and audience targeting.

The msclkid click ID will be included in all subsequent UET events fired whenever the same customer visits your page, thereby allowing you to track the conversion from this customer on your site.

How to Enable Facebook Click IDs (fbclid)

Facebook Click IDs (fbclid) are automatically added to your Facebook and Instagram advertising links, as well as external links in regular, non-sponsored posts.

There is no setting to enable them, and you will not be able to create ads with fbclids in the URLs — the fbclid parameter and string of characters must be added by Facebook and is unique to that click.

The one setup step required is making sure you have the Facebook Pixel installed on your website. This code allows you to track conversions and user behavior on your site, and sends this data back to Facebook.

Capturing Ad Click IDs in Your Salesforce Leads

There are several options for recording the various advertising click IDs in your Salesforce leads, so you can see which advertising created an individual lead.

Most importantly, capturing this data gives you visibility into offline conversions that might happen weeks or months later in Salesforce. By offline conversions, we mean sales that happen at some point in the future, long after the visit to your website from a user clicking on an advertisement.

While Google, Microsoft and Facebook can provide tracking from sales that happen during the initial visit from an ad, such as in some eCommerce, for more considered purchases such as B2B software or higher ticket consumer items, Salesforce can help you attribute sales that happen “offline” to the original advertising campaign and targeting that brought that lead to you originally.

You can also upload that conversion data with ad IDs back into Google and Microsoft advertising, though normally just for conversions within 90 days. So if you have a longer sales cycle, you may need to upload conversions to leads, or from leads to open opportunities, rather than click IDs with closed won opportunities. We’ll get into that in more detail later in this article.

There are three basic ways to capture ad clicks in Salesforce:

Custom web development
Google Tag Manager
Marketing attribution apps

Custom Web Development

Your organization may have already developed custom code to add UTM tags and other source data in your Salesforce web-to-lead forms. If so, you should ask your web developer to begin capturing the 3 ad click parameters (gclid, msclkid, fbclid) as well.

The ad click parameters should be able to be captured similarly to any other URL parameter, though they are a bit longer than your typical parameter value (60 – 100+ characters typically).

Google Tag Manager

If you are an advanced Google Tag Manager (GTM) user, you can use it to create a script that will capture Ad click ID parameters, though you will still need to do some custom work to use the values.

Go to Google Tag Manager and create a new User-Defined Variable.
Choose URL as the variable type.
Set the component type to Query and the Query Key to “msclkid” (or “gclid” or “fbclid”)
Name the variable (e.g., “MSCLKID Variable”).
Create a trigger to fire on all page views.
Create a tag that sends the captured variable to your analytics tool or stores it in a cookie / local web browser storage.
Set up the tag to fire on the trigger you created.

Marketing Attribution Apps

Many marketers should be able to use their marketing attribution software to capture ad click parameters, though not all will have that capability, or expose the values inside Salesforce leads.

Since we provide the CloudAmp Campaign Tracker software for Salesforce, this article will provide instructions on how to implement that software to capture click IDs. CloudAmp captures all three ad click IDs (gclid, msclkid, and fbclid) from both the first and last touch (first and last visits to your website), so you get a complete picture of how a lead interacted with your advertising.

Capturing Ad Click IDs with the Campaign Tracker

Install the CloudAmp Campaign Tracker in Salesforce with a 30 day trial
Add the tracking script to your website footer.
For a quick overview of the process, see our Quick Start Guide.

Once the Campaign Tracker is installed and working, you can test to make sure the ad click parameters are successfully showing up in Salesforce. For testing, you do not need to click on one of your ads, but can use our spreadsheet template download to generate test URLs, and add a test gclid, msclkid, or fbclid parameter at the end of any URL in this format:

&gclid=9949435394i5322urwiehr

So a test URL format would be similar to:

https://www.yoursite.com?utm_campaign=CampaignOct23&utm_medium=PPC&utm_source=Google&utm_id=Goog_04&utm_content=Adgroup3&utm_term=Keyword3&gclid=9949435394i5322urwiehr

Once you have submitted a test lead or two, check Salesforce. You will see the gclid value from your URL in either the “First gclid” or “Last gclid” field on the new lead. Similarly, the msclkid and fbclid values will be in the “First msclkid” or “Last msclkid” fields, and the fbclid in the “First fbclid” or “Last fbclid” fields.

Using Click IDs in Salesforce Leads to Optimize Ads

When you associate click IDs with individual leads in Salesforce, you can analyze the performance of your campaigns in a much more accurate way. Not only can you understand which campaigns drive the most leads and conversions, but you can attribute offline conversions and revenue to each campaign, and calculate the return on investment (ROI).

Automated tools such as Google’s Smart Bidding and Microsoft Advertising Bid Strategies will use Gclid and Msclkid data respectively to adjust your CPC bids dynamically based on their estimates of a click resulting in a conversion.

But only by connecting ad click ID data with CRM systems like Salesforce will enable you to get a holistic view of your campaigns, tracking the entire funnel from ad click to conversion to sale.

Frustratingly, none of the advertising platforms allow you to look up the ad clicks directly in their reporting interfaces, so you cannot review the ads and keywords from individual conversions. All 3 only make the Ad IDs (gclid, msclkid, and fbclid) available via their API reporting interfaces, which requires custom coding. Google and Microsoft do allow you to import offline conversion data with ad IDs from Salesforce however.

So here are some specific techniques you can use with Ad click IDs in Salesforce. We’ll start with general optimization strategies, and then go into specifics about how you can review Ad IDs stored in Salesforce on each advertising platform.

Advertising Optimization Strategies using Click IDs in Salesforce

Inside of Salesforce, you can use conversions associated with Click IDs, as well as other campaign values such as utm_campaign or utm_term (keyword) to optimize advertising campaign performance in the following ways:

Keyword Optimization

Understand which keywords are driving the most conversions, and expand high-converting keywords in your campaigns.
See which keywords drive clicks that never become leads, or leads that never convert to opportunities, and either remove budget or add them as negative keywords to reduce wasted ad spend.

Budget Optimization

Shift budget to campaigns, ad groups and keywords that have higher conversion rates.
Reduce or pause low-performing campaigns or keywords.

Cross-Channel Insights

Using click ID data, see which advertising platforms (e.g., Google Ads, Microsoft Advertising, Facebook Ads) your leads are interacting with during their customer journey
With more advanced attribution data like that provided by the CloudAmp Campaign Tracker, see which touch points contribute to conversions, and adjust your strategy based on those interactions and channels

Next we’ll explore how you can feed conversion and ad click ID data from Salesforce back into Google and Microsoft ad platforms, to optimize targeting and bidding automation there.

Gclid Lookup and Import in Google Ads

We’ve previously provided a detailed guide on how to connect Salesforce and Google Ads using gclid data in Salesforce, and the existing data import tool in Google Ads. For complete details, please see our post How to Connect Salesforce and Google Ads.

That guide will help you automatically import conversion data from Salesforce to Google, to optimize your advertising through Conversion Goals. Here is an example of a Conversion Goal importing Closed Won opportunity data from Salesforce with associated Gclids back into Google Ads:

Importing your offline conversions with Gclids from Salesforce or other sources back into Google Ads seems to be the primary way Google allows you to use Gclids.

Unfortunately Google seems to have removed the ability for advertisers to look up individual advertising clicks via gclid in Google Ads. I am not sure when it was last available, but their often confused AI seems to still think it is possible as of June 2024:

It would seem that Google wants advertisers to use their automated bidding and conversion optimization tools, and does not want users able to easily correlate individual clicks with search terms and campaigns to do manual optimization.

This is disappointing, as reviewing this data can help advertisers understand their targeting and keywords much better. In addition, I have found manual optimization of Google Ads to be more effective for advertisers who do not have a high volume of leads coming through paid search, especially if you want to optimize for offline conversions common in B2B sales.

Programmatic Gclid Access

Apparently if you want to analyze GCLID data directly, the gclids are accessible using Google Ads API or Adwords BigQuery Transfer.

So if you have an experienced developer on your team (unlikely) and they have spare cycles (impossible), perhaps you can get them to write a custom reporting interface to pull the Gclid data from the Google Ads API. This is not something we have done, so I cannot give you an overview of how it might work.

Gclid Reporting in Google Analytics

In Google Analytics GA4, there is a dimension in the reporting called Landing Page + Query String which contains all of the query parameters on the URL. So you can use that dimension to filter on gclid in both standard and exploration reports.

In addition, if you create a custom dimension for gclid data, you can view Google Ads as a source in your reports. This isn’t a great substitute for being able to see the data in Google Ads directly, but advanced Google Analytics users will likely find it useful.

To create a custom dimension, follow these steps:

Go to Admin settings in Google Analytics.
Go to Custom definitions
Click Create custom dimension
Name the new custom dimension “gclid“
For scope, select User
Click Save

Msclkid Lookup and Import in Microsoft Ads

Similarly to Gclids and Google Ads, Msclkid is not available as a dimension in the Microsoft Ads reporting interface. You can import data from Salesforce with your msclkids to register offline conversions in the conversion tracking, however. This will enable you to track conversion and revenue performance from your Microsoft ads.

You can create offline conversion goals in Microsoft Ads, and then import leads or sales (opportunities) from Salesforce that have msclkid values, as long as the conversion is uploaded within 90 days of the last ad click.

To set up Microsoft Ads Offline Conversion Tracking Imports:

Select Tools > Conversion goals from the top menu.
1. In the new navigation, hover over Conversions and select Conversion goals.
Select Create conversion goal
select the Offline conversions type.
Enter a name for your goal
To add a monetary value for each conversion, select a checkbox under Revenue
1. Each time it happens, the conversion action has the same value.
2. The value of this conversion action may vary
Assign a Count to the conversion
Enter a Conversion window to track up to 90 days in the past.
Select Save.

Once you have created a conversion goal, you can begin uploading the conversions after a 2 hour waiting period. Offline conversion files can be uploaded once, on a schedule, or using APIs.

To Prepare your offline conversion data for import

Download the template as an Excel or .csv file.
Create a report in Salesforce
1. Leads or Opportunities with their corresponding MSCLKIDs
2. Optional conversion value (if opportunities).
3. Export the report to copy / paste into the template
Enter the following information:
1. Microsoft Click ID. (MSCLKID that led to the conversion and is stored in the Salesforce lead)
2. Conversion Name. The goal name you entered in step 4 above.
3. Conversion Time. The date and time that the conversion occurred. There are some specific requirements around the accepted formats here.
4. Conversion Value (optional).
5. Conversion Currency (optional). If not specified, the value defined in the goal will be used.
Save the file locally to import it once. To schedule recurring imports, you would need to save the file to an online location and regularly update its data. See the Microsoft Ads documentation for more details.

Import offline conversions from Salesforce to Microsoft Ads once

Once you have prepared your Excel or CSV file:

Select Tools > Conversion goals from the top menu.
1. In the new navigation, hover over Conversions and select Conversion goals.
Under the Uploads tab, select + Upload.
Click Browse and select your file to upload.
Click Upload and preview.
Once your upload is complete, you can view the results of the changes from your new data. If there are any errors, you can download them to troubleshoot.
Select Apply changes when you’re ready.

Fbclid Lookup and Import in Facebook Ads

Because fbclid is not directly available as a dimension in Facebook Ads Manager, you’ll need to correlate it with the captured data in your Salesforce leads.

You should be able to achieve this by creating a custom report in the “Ads Reporting” section of Facebook Ads that shows conversions and related performance metrics. If you have a high volume of conversions in Facebook and leads in Salesforce, it may be difficult to correlate them precisely however.

Facebook does have a Conversions API which software developers can use to import offline conversions via CSV file, but it requires some technical expertise as there does not seem to be a UI to do it.

Get Help from CloudAmp

As you can see from the length of this article, capturing and using ad click IDs can be a complex undertaking. If you need assistance setting up the GCLID or MSCLKID integrations / uploads with Salesforce, and optimizing your Ads with Salesforce lead and opportunity conversion data, CloudAmp can help.

Not yet a CloudAmp customer? The CloudAmp Campaign Tracker is an affordable monthly subscription, and has a 30 day no obligation trial so you can test it out in Salesforce.

To get 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.

CloudAmp Campaign Tracker 3.5 Release

Posted on September 21, 2023October 13, 2023 by David Hecht

CloudAmp’s Campaign Tracker version 3.5 is now available on the Salesforce AppExchange. This new version contains a number of new features and improvements to help you improve your lead generation and optimize your online advertising spend.

The 3.5 release is now available as a free update to existing CloudAmp customers, or as a free 30 day trial to any Salesforce 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.

utm_id Capture

The Campaign Tracker now captures Campaign IDs, using the recently added Google Analytics campaign parameter utm_id. This parameter can be used in your URLs to identify a specific campaign or promotion, and will now be captured into your leads and contacts using the Campaign Tracker app.

The utm_id is a required key for GA4 data import. This can be useful if you want to import non-Google advertising data, such as ad network cost, click, and impression data. By using the utm_id as the key, you can import data to Google Analytics and combine cost data from external sources with session data in Google Analytics.

To import cost data, the following data dimensions are required:

Campaign ID (utm_id)
Source (utm_source)
Medium (utm_medium)
Campaign name (utm_campaign)
Date (ISO 8601: YYYY-MM-DD)

At least one of the following metrics is required:

Clicks (daily value) (optional)
Cost (daily value in the format 0,000.00) (optional, but expected)
Impressions (daily value) (optional)

The Campaign Tracker will now capture those Campaign ID (bing_001, facebook_42, etc.) from incoming links to your website from advertising, email newsletters, or social media.

This means on the Salesforce side you can now use the Campaign ID to automatically associate leads with Salesforce campaigns using a flow.

You also now have a unique identifier that can be used to import data into Google Analytics. Beyond cost data you can create custom dimensions in GA4 for aspects of leads, converted leads, or opportunities you wish to track (for information on a different type of connection, please see our guide to connecting Salesforce and Google Ads via the Google Click ID (aka Gclid, also captured by the CloudAmp Campaign Tracker.)

Microsoft Click ID (MSCLKID) Capture

The CloudAmp Campaign Tracker now captures the Microsoft Click ID, and stores it in the same field as the more familiar Gclid (Google Click ID). So if you have Microsoft autotagging enabled for your Microsoft Ads / Bing advertising, this unique click ID parameter Msclkid will be added to your landing page URL, and captured into the Lead in Salesforce.

This ensures you have full conversion tracking, tying your Salesforce lead to the Bing Ad click ID.

To enable auto-tagging of Microsoft Click ID (MSCLKID):

Select All campaigns > Settings > Account level options.
Check the Add Microsoft Click ID (MSCLKID) to URLs to allow conversion tracking checkbox.
Select Save.

On the CloudAmp side, just make sure you have updated to version 3.5 to capture the Msclkid tracking parameter.

Opportunity Keywords & Ad IDs

In the latest Campaign Tracker, we’ve made it easier to report on Keywords and Ads that resulted in Opportunities. Now when you convert a lead, in addition to the resulting converted Lead / Contact being related to the Opportunity, the Ad keyword and ID are copied to new fields on the Opportunity.

Based on feedback from you, our customers, many people wanted to see advertising information directly on the Opportunity, rather than by relationship to the Contact who clicked on the ad.

This is designed to make reporting easier — you can now run Opportunity-only reports, and see keywords in your pipeline review. It also offers a convenient way to export Opportunities with Ad IDs to CSV for import into other ad tracking and analytics systems.

Improvements & Bug Fixes

Tracking Script

The javascript tracking code you place on your website has been completely modernized and retested for performance and security improvements.

Visitor Sessions Permissions

Fixed an issue that caused errors copying visitor sessions to the contact, when certain user profiles converted leads.

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.

Which Form or Web Page did a Salesforce lead come from?

Posted on August 18, 2023April 1, 2025 by David Hecht

Forms are one of the most essential parts of any website, providing a convenient way for visitors to “raise their hands” and request more information or take advantage of an offer. Web forms are also a critical way for your company to learn more about who is on your website, receive and qualify leads, and hopefully start your visitors on their buyer’s journey.

When you have multiple contact forms, tens or even hundreds of landing pages, and different paths visitors take on your web site, it can be difficult to keep track of which form a Salesforce lead came in through. Most forms are used with a specific conversion path, so in order to analyze your marketing results and most effectively connect with your leads, you need to know what that path was.

Know what page a lead came from
Understand where in the buyer journey your lead is
Track which offers or downloads prospects responded to
Score your MQLs more effectively with precise source data

So how can you know which form on your web site a lead filled out? Read on to learn about multiple different methods you can use to get this important marketing data.

Topics in this article:

Hidden Lead Source in Forms
Automatic Campaign Assignment for Leads
Custom Salesforce Fields in Forms
Using a Single Form on Multiple Pages

Form ID and Name
UTM or other URL Parameters
Salesforce Visitor Sessions (List of Pages Visited)

Hidden Lead Source in Forms

If you are using Salesforce web-to-lead forms, or other forms like Gravity Forms or FormAssembly that can post leads into Salesforce, adding a hidden Lead Source field to your forms is one of the easiest ways of identifying them.

This method hard-codes a hidden field with a lead source value that you set for each form, and pushes that value to the existing Lead Source field on the Lead object in Salesforce.

Here is an example from a Salesforce web-to-lead form:

<input type="hidden" name="lead_source" value="LP Trial Offer">

Pro-tip: Use a common naming convention in your lead source values, such as “LP” for landing page, to make reporting in Salesforce easier (Lead Source *Contains* LP will collect them all).

Another advantage of using hidden fields in this manner is that you can insert Lead Sources into your Salesforce leads that are not actually selectable values in the Lead Source drop down list. Salesforce will insert any value in the Lead Source field when the lead is created.

This approach means that you can be sure those lead sources are only coming from your form, since the value is not available to Salesforce users to select. No more random selections from the Sales team (not that your sales team would ever do that!)

On the minus side, there are some limitations to reporting if a Lead Source value is not added to the picklist values in Salesforce — namely you won’t be able to filter on those values by selecting one or more of them in a report. But you can still use “Starts with” or “Contains” to include any values.

Automatic Campaign Assignment for Leads

Similarly to using a hidden field in your forms to set a Lead Source in Salesforce, you can also automatically have leads added to a Salesforce Campaign using a similar method.

By adding a hidden field that passes the Campaign ID, your forms will automatically make leads members of that particular Campaign when they are created in Salesforce.

This technique is especially useful for forms or landing pages that are specific to a particular marketing campaign, since Salesforce Campaigns allow you to track members of a campaign from Leads through to conversion to Contacts, and see the ROI summarized clearly via Opportunities.

Here is an example of hard coding the Campaign ID in a hidden field in a Salesforce web-to-lead form.

<input type="hidden" name="Campaign_ID" value="7010V000001ufMIQAY">

To get the Campaign ID value for your hidden field, simply navigate to the Campaign Record in Salesforce, and copy the 18 digit record ID from the Salesforce URL in your web browser.

Having leads automatically assigned to a Salesforce Campaign can be useful for other purposes as well, such as segmentation. If you want to compare leads that come in from a “Contact Us” form on your web site in total versus advertising landing pages, having them all assigned to a “Contact Us Form Campaign” makes it easier.

There are other advantages of assigning Salesforce Leads to Campaigns automatically, such as the ability to send Emails to campaign members in Salesforce (both Leads and Contacts at the same time, as long as they are members of the Campaign), as well as tracking any Opportunities that were generated from Campaign members.

👍 Need more Campaign automation?

While hard coding a Campaign ID works well, it is not a very flexible solution. For several more options, including completely automatatic Campaign Creation and Lead Assignment based on UTM Campaign values, see our complete guide:

How to Automatically Assign Salesforce Leads to Campaigns

Custom Salesforce Fields in Forms

Custom fields are one of the more powerful features of Salesforce that most organizations take advantage of to capture unique business data.

Just like the hidden Lead Source and Campaign ID fields shown above, you can add Custom fields from Salesforce to your forms to better identify them.

In most cases these custom Salesforce fields would be hidden, transmitting their values in the background when a form is submitted, but in some cases you could make them visible to visitors (such as in a quote form where the lead might choose a value from a picklist, that might also enable you to identify the source form).

Here is a high level overview of how to create a custom field in Salesforce (you will need to be a Salesforce Administrator or have “Customize Application” permissions:

Go to Setup
From the Object Manager, select the Lead object
Select Fields & Relationships
Click the New button

There are quite a few considerations and configuration options at that point, so please refer to Salesforce’s custom field documentation for full details.

Once you have created a custom field, you will need to add it to your form. For Salesforce web-to-lead forms, you can generate updated code from the setup page after including the new field.

For other form providers, you will likely need to refresh the connection to Salesforce, to have the new custom field available in the mapping / form setup interface.

Using a Single Form on Multiple Pages

If you are using the same form on multiple pages, which is especially common if that form is being dynamically embedded using a script or iFrame on your web site, things get a lot harder.

Forms that are embedded, rather than having their full HTML code as part of the web page, are an increasingly popular option. They allow marketers a greater degree of control, with a single embed tag added to your web site, and a separate form software interface where you can configure your form and simply click a button to publish a new version.

Many embedded forms offer a way of getting the page URL, and making it part of the form submission. With a single form across many web pages, it has become essential for some unique identifier to be captured with the form submit.

Otherwise you have no way of knowing where your submissions are coming from when the same form is embedded in many web pages.

Here is an example of a useful widget that the form provider JotForm makes available to its customers:

Check with your form provider to see if any hidden fields or widgets exist to give you some insights on where your customers are filling out your forms.

Using a single form across multiple pages of your web site does make setting up and maintaining lead generation forms simpler (especially if you have 25+ landing pages with forms, as is common for many businesses that market online).

However, if you have the option from a form technology perspective, working with your web developer to duplicate and customize your forms individually can provide automation advantages on the lead qualification side (such as auto-assigning to Salesforce Campaigns or Lead Sources described above).

You’ll just need to keep an organized spreadsheet of your landing and form pages, and make sure your web developer is careful and understands the importance of updating the values when creating new forms.

Form ID and Name

Many forms have an ID and/or Name in their code, which helps identify them as your web page loads. These form attributes are also referenced by apps like the CloudAmp Campaign Tracker, which uses the IDs to tell our tracking script where to insert marketing attribution data.

To find the form ID, follow these steps.

Load the web page with your form
Right click on the form and select Inspect Element
Type Ctrl + F to bring up the search (find) box.
Enter <form to find the beginning of a form in the code

Some forms have an ID, and some have a name. Most forms have both, but either can be used to identify the individual form.

Once you have identified the attributes, the tricky part is determining if they can be passed to Salesforce in some way. Your web developer may be able to use the form ID to capture the form source information when a visitor clicks to submit the form, and pass it to Salesforce along with the other fields.

Here is an example of a form ID in the initial Form tag, from Gravity Forms:

<form method="post" enctype="multipart/form-data" target="gform_ajax_frame_1" id="gform_1" action="/contact-us/#gf_1" data-formid="1" novalidate="">

Note: Salesforce web-to-lead forms do not have IDs or Names, but define a separate hidden field for the Salesforce Org ID, named OID.

UTM or other URL Parameters

This solution is not part of the form itself, but if you are capturing parameters from an incoming link to your website, you may be able to use those to identify the form.

As an example of what we mean by parameters would be a URL such as:

https://www.YOURSITE.com?utm_source=GoogleAds&utm_medium=PPC&utm_campaign=CampaignName&utm_term={Keyword}

The parameters are in green text, and their sample values are shown in red text. The ? in the URL defines when the web address ends and the optional parameters start, and the & characters separate the different parameters.

Some of the most common parameters are known as the UTM or Google Analytics Campaign parameters:

utm_id: Campaign ID.
utm_source: Referrer to your website, for example: facebook, google
utm_medium: Marketing medium, for example: PPC, email newsletter
utm_campaign: Marketing campaign name or identifier (product, dates, etc.)
utm_term: Paid keyword, commonly from Google Ads or Bing
utm_content: More information about the marketing creative, ad text, etc.

Your web developer may know how to write javascript to capture parameters in the URLs that visitors click through to get to your website, or you can use a Salesforce app like CloudAmp’s Campaign Tracker to capture the data and make it part of your Salesforce leads.

This approach assumes that you have landing pages that are only receiving traffic from certain campaigns. It will not work with generic Contact Us pages or similar forms, where visitors from many different sources might be arriving there.

You can also use utm values to define source data (utm_campaign=LandingPageOffer1), and if you make it unique to a particular landing page, tie that back in your tracking (be sure to keep a careful UTM values spreadsheet in that case!)

Salesforce Visitor Sessions (List of Pages Visited)

Some tools like CloudAmp’s Campaign Tracker will show you a complete list of pages that your lead visited on your web site, prior to filling out a lead form. You can often see multiple visits (sessions) as well.

In the CloudAmp app, this data is provided in the “Visitor Sessions” object in Salesforce, which is related to the Lead (and later the Contact after conversion).

Here is an example lead, with the Visitor Sessions related list in the right hand column, showing the pages viewed by the Salesforce lead before they submitted a form.

As you can see from this simple example, the lead landed on a Setup page, and then went to the Contact page, which is where they submitted the form.

You can click “View All” to see the full related list, where you can more easily see the page titles and complete URLs, as well as the time stamps from when a visitor was on each one of your web pages.

If a lead visits your web site multiple times before submitting a form, that is shown in the data as well. Each session (visit) is numbered to tell them apart and give you visibility into which web pages the Salesforce lead viewed.

We’ve reviewed seven (7!) different ways to know what web page form a Salesforce lead came in through. There are likely other methods as well, but one or more of these should give you a good starting point to capturing better marketing data in Salesforce.

If you have questions or feedback about the approaches described above, don’t hesitate to contact us. (Comments are turned off here to prevent spam, but we’re always happy to talk shop via email).

Learn more about CloudAmp

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.