Columbus, OH (PRWEB) May 9, 2007 — By successfully integrating online advertising and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tracking in the most recent release of its search engine marketing technology platform, ClearSaleing Inc. is now able to provide direct marketers and catalog retailers the ability to connect the dots between their Internet marketing investment and offline sales results.

Direct marketers and catalog retailers make significant expenditures in online advertising programs, such as search engine marketing, shopping comparison engines, affiliate networks, buzz marketing, email and banner campaigns, but have struggled for years to understand and quantify the true impact and ROI of their Internet advertising investment. The disconnect results from the fact that direct marketers and catalog retailers advertise online, close the actual sale offline, track the sale in a CRM system such as SalesForce.com or Oracle CRM On Demand, and until now have not had access to technology that bridges these gaps.

ClearSaleing's configurable solution integrates its proprietary Internet advertising tracking platform, ProfitTracker, with major CRM platforms, including Oracle CRM OnDemand, SalesForce.com, ACT and Goldmine. With the complex integration between online lead tracking and offline sales reporting complete, direct marketers and catalog retailers need only install the ClearSaleing tracking code on their Web site.

ClearSaleing's search engine marketing system gives them the ability to measure the profitability and ROI of every online advertising source, campaign and keyword. With this 360 degree view of their Internet advertising programs and associated sales results tightly integrated into their CRM systems direct marketers and catalog retailers are empowered and able to optimize their search engine marketing investments.

Linmar Systems, a document processing solutions company headquartered in Norcross, Georgia, recently implemented ClearSaleing's search engine marketing solution. Like many companies across nearly every industry, Linmar believed it should allocate more of its marketing budget to online advertising sources. Until now, however, it was impossible to determine the true profitability and return on that investment. With the seamless integration of the ClearSaleing search engine marketing solution and its Oracle CRM OnDemand system, Linmar can now optimize their online advertising campaigns. They can see in one simple dashboard how well each campaign, ad source and keyword are performing as measured by the only metric that matters…Profit.

"ClearSaleing has removed the mystery of determining the true, bottom-line impact of our increased investment in search engine marketing", said Marty Grubin, CEO of Linmar Systems. "We can now advertise online with complete confidence in the results and track our online advertising to our CRM sales activity."

Contact Gavin Meyers for more information at (800) 592-0463 or visit www.clearsaleing.com/CRM.html.

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.

You recently passed the Google test, and you’re eager to show off your new SEM expertise to a civilian. You pull up the following information for Bruce:

Based on the data, you confidently explain that at $48, “30 year mortgage”has the lowest cost per lead. The answer’s obvious, and you get that “I’m bored with you now”look on your face. “That’s terrific, Bruce says. “So how many mortgages have we closed as a result of that keyword?”

“Ummm” — you fidget like a 3rd grader giving his first oral book report. “I have no idea.”

Bruce asks you politely to pause the campaign, as he tries to remember if he has HR on speed dial.

Sound familiar to anyone?

Fast forward a few days. Let’s assume that you did a little research (between frequent trips to Monster.com) and discover that the sales information you need resides in your company’s CRM system. But you don’t know how to combine that information with your PPC data. So you close your eyes and pray to the IT gods. The IT gods sprinkle a little code dust on your system and close the loop between your PPC application and your CRM system. Now when you generate a particular lead from your Web site, you can determine whether the lead eventually turns into an offline sale by looking at the sales stage. You can also identify the source of that sale (search engine, keyword, and ad text).

So with this additional, integrated information, let’s revisit the scenario:

You know the cost per lead and now you also know the number of sales generated for each keyword. A little simple math gives you the new answer to Bruce’s question: at $2,080, “fixed mortgage”required the fewest number of leads to generate a sale and therefore had the lowest ad cost per sale. So it must be the best performing keyword.

You email Bruce with the answer. A short time later he strolls down to your cube and apologies for giving you a “needs improvement”on your performance review. But as he starts thinking about the data, he points out that while ad cost per sale is a valuable metric, what he really needs to see is the profitability associated with the keyword and sale. He just completed an expensive management seminar where he learned that unprofitable sales are bad.

You vaguely remember reading about profitability on a blog somewhere and, genius that you are, realize that once the IT gods integrated the CRM system into your PPC application, you had all the information you needed to answer the profitability question. You explain to Bruce that if you just apply the actual revenue minus costs (which you know from your CRM data), you can figure out the gross profit of the sale. Then you just have to back out the ad cost and, a la kazam, you have true profitability.

“Now,”you say to Bruce, “I can identify exactly which keywords are generating profitable sales.” And you show him the following data:

What appeared initially to be the correct answer, “30 year mortgage,”actually turns out to be the worst (-$100) when profitability is applied. “Fixed mortgage”is better at $2,020. But when you have the additional revenue and cost data, you can see that it isn’t quite as good as “mortgage.” When taking profitability into account, it’s clear that at $2,400 “mortgage”is the undisputed champ.

Bruce eyes you suspiciously, realizing that the little twit he almost fired will now be asking for a raise.

So as a result of the PPC & CRM integration, you can automatically match sales to leads and calculate profitability. Each time you close an offline sale and record the sale in your CRM system, the sale gets matched to the lead where the sale originated. With this data, you can identify which ads are responsible for your most profitable sales. Then you’ll be able to maximize the profitability of your account by focusing your ad spend only on keywords and search engines that have proven to turn a profit. You can eliminate the rest.

For those of you who can’t find “praying to the IT gods”in your company’s project management manuals, stay tuned. We’ll have more information on how to execute a flawless PPC & CRM integration project in an upcoming blog. We’ll probably call it something like “How to Execute a Flawless PPC & CRM Integration Project.”