Salesforce Dives Deep into Google Adwords

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1. Ben
   

   August 21st, 2006 at 9:40 pm

   Since we all have been wondering when/if he was ever going to start spending his market cap, it will be interesting to deal the size and structure of this deal.

   It is a great move for salesforce in putting something into the product that extends thier focus on providing results for sales guys and show that in the end, they are not your father’s enterprise software company.

2. Robbi
   

   August 21st, 2006 at 11:30 pm

   What about Yahoo! Search Marketing, Miva und Mirago if you like the german language try http://www.bid-manager.de

3. james
   

   August 22nd, 2006 at 12:33 am

   doesn’t google adwords do this anyway, with its tracking facility?

4. Ed
   

   August 22nd, 2006 at 3:43 am

   $300 per month?

   Seriously?

   Plus the $75-$150 for your salesforce license and you’re looking at $400-$500 per month for a tool that looks harder to use than the google frontend itself.

   What use is a PPC management console if it’s only good for google? I need to be able to manage my MSN and overture PPC campaigns as well.

   God I wish SFDC would just die already.

5. Chris
   

   August 22nd, 2006 at 4:14 am

   this “tool” is pretty much a joke. We’re continually evaluating search tracking technologies and as a SalesForce user we were excited to hear about this when it came out but it’s pretty much useless and I wouldn’t use it even if it were offered for free.

6. Jonathan Mendez
   

   August 22nd, 2006 at 5:48 am

   I guess this is supposed to be some ancillary lead-gen tool for sales? However, this is not “clearly needed by small and mid sized businesses ” when the channels themselves provide more robust data and tools. Besides, when and why are my sales guys going to be managing my marketing spend?

7. Erik
   

   August 22nd, 2006 at 6:24 am

   The only thing that I can think of is that this will allow them to streamline their adword buys into their accounting systems (since that would most likely already be integrated with SalesForce).

   For a medium-sized company that spends a good amount on AdWords, this functionality alone might be worth $300/month.

8. Ed Buchholz
   

   August 22nd, 2006 at 7:13 am

   Salesforce / Accounting integrations are, at best, unreliable and a pain.

   For the most part, the large organizations that could benefit from this type of integration are already utilizing a 3rd party seo / sem company.

   This further compounds my assertion that AppExchange is a joke, and the people driving strategy behind it are simply blind.

9. Glen Moriarty
   

   August 22nd, 2006 at 7:32 am

   This looks pretty similar to what Google already provides for free with there Adwords - Google Analytics. We partnered with a firm, Strategy Trails (www.strategytrails.com) and have found that Google Analytics works great: http://www.analytics.google.com.

10. Kingsley Joseph
    

    August 22nd, 2006 at 7:42 am

    Ed, it’s a flat $300/month for an entire organization.

    The value proposition is end to end search marketing: create marketing campaigns in Salesforce, create ads associated with them, make keyword bids, track click-throughs down to lead or product purchase and report on ROI all from within Salesforce.

    Kieden has built some very cool technology and are a bunch of smart people besides - I’m excited to be working with them.

11. Rajan Sodhi
    

    August 22nd, 2006 at 7:58 am

    This is great to hear. I would imagine this will compete directly with Omniture’s SearchCenter product. The idea of it integrating with a CRM system is very compelling.

12. Matt Ho
    

    August 22nd, 2006 at 9:16 am

    For organizations that use CRM, the problem has been how to track advertising spend through to revenue.

    Tools like Google Analytics do a great job when the sale can be made completely online. However, for companies with salespeople, most sales are made offline and are tracked through the CRM system. Consequently, tools that don’t integrate to a CRM lose visibility and can’t show ROI.

    However, this is where Salesforce for Google AdWords really shines. Because of its tight integration with both Salesforce and AdWords, companies finally have end to end visibility of their advertising efforts.

13. Mohit Mahendra
    

    August 22nd, 2006 at 9:50 am

    The ad campaign execution and analytics may be better provided thru Google’s UI itself, and free as well. But this hooks the campaign into the selling cycle, right upto the end of the cycle. Google can track how many leads a campaign brought, but not how much revenue it generated. That insight itself is worth a lot more than $300. But I see this useful primarily for Google advertisers that sell offline. Wonder how much of Google’s customer base are those ones…much of Google’s own energy appears to be directed towards those who sell online - pay-per-action campaigns, online payments…

14. Michael Arrington
    

    August 22nd, 2006 at 10:18 am

    In a previous job we spent quite a bit of money advertising on Google - $20k or so per week. I had a full time analyst who did nothing but crunch numbers to make sure we weren’t losing our shirt on keyword buys. The reports he created were basically what Salesforce is providing here…so in my opinion this is a very good tool.

15. Jonathan Mendez
    

    August 22nd, 2006 at 1:35 pm

    It’s nice to go down funnel with analytics but most businesses are hard pressed to even figure out an accurate CPL metric that they are comfortable with. Let alone a resolving that back to a CPS or LCV number. This is a huge issue for even the largest lead-gen players (auto, b2b) especially when you factor in issues with de-duping and washing leads. Keyword level ROI is great but I’m interested in the bid management capabilities of the tool. It’s nice to know what your CPL is but more important is the ability to manage to a predetermined metric.

16. Scott Hemmeter
    

    August 22nd, 2006 at 3:32 pm

    I write a Salesforce.com focused blog and did a write up on this functionality back in June when it was still owned by Kieden. Pretty impressive.

    Check it out here

17. Chris
    

    August 22nd, 2006 at 5:53 pm

    I saw this presented at the SalesForce luncheon today in NYC and after my harsh comment above I’ll admit I can see some practical applications, just not for the types of campaigns we run. We run hundreds of thousands of keywords with thousands of pieces of creative across multiple engines and this tool just can’t cut it. If you’re spending a few thousand or more and want to see the chain from the click in google to the lead captured in salesforce then you’ve got something here. I like that you can see the actual leads connected to the keyword and creative.