Some may recall my whining about a month back about all the work it took to get Salesforce.com and Google Adwords integration up and running. The endgame was that there were some problems on my side with a PERL script we use, but it went farther than that – I was editing the script correctly but the FTP tool I was using would corrupt it on the upload… Enough with the propeller head stuff – how does it work?
It rocks much harder than I thought it would. Not only can I now track keywords directly back to the individual leads that they generate there’s another unintended benefit: the SF code tracks ALL referrals. Most visitors to your site will leave a record in your log files about where they came from – the referrer. For example if you followed a click from my blog to Amazon, my homey JB would see that you came from the Ronin’s dojo.
So the killer bonus is that this salesforce code is appending ALL of the referring links. Let’s say one of my execs gets an article placed in an online publication, if someone reads that pub and then comes to my site and requests a white paper, when that lead is added to salesforce there’s a record in the history that shows the link from the publication where it came from. I’ve gone from knowing from where around 40% of the leads came from with a questionable degree of certainty up to 90% with the actual referring URL. Not bad for slapping a few lines of code into the site template.
Now if I could only upgrade to enterprise so I could get the API to play with that data…
2 replies on “Ultimate Metrics”
What you SHOULD do is slap a patent on your code, market it as an upgrade and sell the hell out of it.
The power of harnessing information like that to a technical ignoramus but sales and marketing addict like myself is huge.
If you can harness that info into an easy to swallow pill, it would sell to S&M directors everywhere.
And if Salesforce.com IS trying to market it, they’ve not done such a hot job, in my opinion.
Thanks, but none of the stuff on the business end is my code. The stuff on my side could all be replicated with stock SF code. Besides, riding the wave of somebody else’s software is tough – a new version comes out, or worse yet a better product comes along and your business vanishes.
I think SF doesn’t have to market it, they have enough going on to keep them moving at 200mph already, but yeah, I had to dig around on my own to find out about it and get it rolling…