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<\/a><\/p>\nThe best time to start tracking your lead sources was 6 months ago. The second best time is today, so don\u2019t put it off any longer \u2014 get lead tracking for Adwords set up today.<\/p>\n
Eliminating Waste vs. Optimizing Performing Keywords<\/h3>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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 \u2014 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n Where do you store your Adwords tracking data? Do you use Salesforce, Google Analytics, or both? What about duplicate \/ conflicting data?<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n A corollary to the \u201csingle source of truth\u201d 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\u2019s different systems don\u2019t match. As with other marketing metrics, it is the trend and the consistency that is more important \u2014 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019t map anywhere upon conversion are all common issues we see with Salesforce usage that affect campaign tracking.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019ll end up with better data and a higher likelihood that you are making decisions based on accurate data as a bonus.<\/p>\n 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\u2019t have development resources at our disposal, or the engineering team is too busy on customer-facing product development to work on internal marketing tools.<\/p>\n For those using standard Salesforce web-to-lead forms and processes, there is a new generation of tools available like our (CloudAmp\u2019s)\u00a0Campaign Tracker<\/a><\/strong>. Installable directly from Salesforce.com\u2019s AppExchange, these tools can add in additional information like where a lead came from, what keywords they searched for, and more.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\nFocusing on Wrong Metrics<\/h3>\n
<\/a><\/p>\nPicking a Source of All Truth<\/h3>\n
<\/a><\/p>\nPoor Lead Hygiene \/ Salesforce Processes<\/h3>\n
<\/a><\/p>\nNot Having Correct Tools<\/h3>\n