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Jun. 5, 2007 at 10:29am Eastern by Barry Schwartz
Google Announces Salesforce.com AdWords Alliance
The rumors have been confirmed. Google announced a strategic alliance with Salesforce.com today.
The alliance will mean that Salesforce.com will build Google AdWords advertising tools directly into the Salesforce.com portal. Salesforce.com will resell AdWords services as a distribution channel for Google.
"The Web has quickly become the most powerful tool small and medium sized businesses can use to compete and win in today’s economy," said Eric Schmidt, chief executive officer at Google. "Combining the power and simplicity of Salesforce with Google AdWords helps businesses find and keep customers to ultimately drive their continued success."
"The alliance of Google and salesforce.com brings together the world’s leading platforms to empower small and medium size businesses to accelerate and thrive," said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of salesforce.com. "The Internet has completely changed the landscape for small and medium businesses and the alliance between Google and salesforce.com enables companies of all sizes to acquire new customers and streamline their business to experience unfettered success."
The full release can be found at: http://www.google.com/intl/en/press/pressrel/salesforce_alliance.html.
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By Barry Schwartz
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See Related Stories In: Google: Partnerships
Although this alliance reconfirms the importance of mashing up Salesforce and Google into a seamless integrated process, I believe the product side of the announcement falls short of addressing the real pain points that marketers feel when trying to use AdWords to drive new business leads.
In particular:
1) Landing pages are critical for driving conversions and improving ranking, but 3 out of 4 companies still send clicks to the home page. Google doesn't care because they still get paid for each click, but the marketer ends up with fewer leads. It’s just too hard to get the right IT support to have enough targeted pages, and the Google-Salesforce alliance provides no solution to this problem.
2) Bidding well is hard for most marketers, and Google-Salesforce provides no help for bid optimization. Again, this suits Google just fine since it's in their interest to have companies over-bid, but it leaves the marketer with suboptimal results.
3) A click is just the beginning of a business sales cycle. Only 25% of the people that click on an ad and fill out a form are ready to speak with a sales rep. Companies need to put in place a relevant and patient nurturing process that guides the prospect from the research stage to being truly "sales ready". Once again, the Google-Salesforce alliance doesn't address this gap in the marketer's business process.
You can read more at http://blog.marketo.com/blog/2007/06/some_gorillas_c.html