Salesforce is now becoming an agency of sorts for Adwords.

This is interesting to me because a client, once upon a time, was integrating their tracking with Salesforce. As I’m always pushing my clients to implement end to end tracking solutions, which are defined differently by every business, I’ve come across Salesforce/PPC tracking a few times.

In this particular case, the client had users register for a whitepaper, once the registration hit the database, the user info was passed into their database and to Salesforce. Now, to date, there wasn’t really an efficient way flag that user as an Adwords prospect. Once that lead hit the Salesforce system they entered one of those epic software sales cycles that lasted 12-16 months. Good luck managing the campaign for ROI based on only landing page conversions. That doesn’t tell me if the keywords I used pulled in a valuable prospect or not, it just told me that someone, anyone, wanted the whitepaper. Not good enough for an ROI freakazoid like me;)

Tracking all the way though the Salesforce CRM lifecycle was a pain. I used a tag in the URL that showed up in some obscure Salesforce field jumbled with other url data. This resulted in a manual parsing of referring information, which required intervention on the clients part, wasting their valuable resources. What would have been ideal would be to have Salesforce look for a variable that I defined, like, ADWORDS>KEYWORD, then, we could sort in Salesforce by PPC lead, keywords, and other useful methods.

So, my question is, will this new Salesforce development come with better integration for PPC/Adwords campaigns with regards to tracking? I would think so, but hey, I’ve been wrong before.