Linmar Systems faced a common problem among PPC advertisers: they couldn’t connect the dots between their spending on an online lead generation and the closing of their opportunities. Like most lead generators, they advertised online, but closed deals offline. Data resided in Oracle’s CRM On Demand, but was not integrated with their advertising sources. They faced the typical problems of trying to figure out which keyword or other advertising source resulted in sales (see our previous post for a more detailed explanation of this problem). As a consequence, they weren’t sure of the effectiveness of their advertising spend.

ClearSaleing developed an out of the box solution to integrate its proprietary profit tracking platform with CRM On Demand. Integrating their online marketing campaigns and CRM OnDemand was easier than they expected given that ClearSaleing’s solution didn’t require Linmar to learn the CRM On Demand Web Service Interface.

The following bullet points explain the integration process for sending leads to CRM OnDemand.

1. Linmar had already implemented ClearSaleing tracking code on their site. This tracking code generates javascript variables that are encoded and sent securely to the ClearSaleing tracking servers. Any time a new Lead is created on the Linmar site, the Lead and the associated tracking information is sent to the ClearSaleing servers.
2. The ClearSaleing system automatically sends the lead to CRM On Demand when a new lead is received from the Linmar web site. A standard “Lead”object is created in CRM On Demand.
3. To see the advertising source data in CRM On Demand, a standard set of fields for tracking online advertising were configured into Linmar’s CRM On Demand implementation. The additional fields were then added to the Opportunity, Contact, Account and Lead views. So when Leads are created and then converted into the other objects, it’s clear what Source (for example, Google AdWords, MSN AdCenter, ASK or Yahoo), Search Campaign, AdGroup and Keyword was responsible for generating that lead.

The important aspect of the ClearSaleing integration is that it doesn’t stop with just sending the information to CRM OnDemand. If that was all that was done, it wouldn’t be clear what the overall ROI on the advertising spend was because the revenue and profit data from the Opportunities has to be compared with the overall cost of the advertising sources. The ClearSaleing System already tracks opportunity revenue and advertising costs so it was just a matter of closing the loop between the two systems. The following bullet points describe this process:

1. On a periodic basis, the ClearSaleing system queries CRM On Demand for any updated Leads or Opportunities
2. When changed Leads and Opportunities are found, ClearSaleing updates the key information on the Lead within the ClearSaleing System.
3. The ClearSaleing Data Warehouse completes the data integration by allowing Leads to be compared with all of the other advertising source data. All of the revenue and advertising costs can be analyzed in one location.

Linmar can now optimize their online PPC campaigns since they can easily see, at the keyword level, how well each keyword generates leads and more importantly how much profit each of those leads can generate. This allows for them to optimize their PPC campaigns by changing their bids based on real profit generating potential from a keyword instead of a generic, high-level Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) metric. A CPA optimization approach can be inaccurate because some keyword generate better leads than other keywords.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 29th, 2007 at 9:30 pm and is filed under All Blogs, CRM, PPC. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.