Salesforce.com's New Small-Business Service

If your e-commerce site is an important source of customer leads, a new Salesforce.com service could be just what you need to streamline the work of turning a new lead into a new customer.

Salesforce Group Edition is the successor to the company's Team Edition customer relationship management service. The major enhancement is its tight integration with the Google AdWords pay-per-click (PPC) advertising service. The integration with AdWords is the best I've seen, as it allows you to easily determine which search engine advertising keywords deliver the most new customers and added revenues to your business. You will need to make a few modifications to your Web site to take advantage of this feature, however.

Complete AdWords Integration

A PPC ad service can drive more visitors to your Web site. You write text ads that display next to the results for specific terms, or keywords, that people enter in search engines. You pay for each visitor who clicks on your ad and is then redirected to your Web site. (Read more about AdWords at "Search-Engine Ads".)

The ability to track the trail of PPC ad clicks, from the initial site visit to the sales lead and ultimately to a sale, is not new. Generally you can see this information in several places: your AdWords account, your Web server logs, and a CRM application.

The elegance of Salesforce Group Edition lies in the way it seamlessly assembles the data from all of these sources in one place so that viewing and analyzing the results of your PPC ads is easier. You can readily see which keywords bring you the biggest bang for your advertising buck. Since the lead-source information updates every 15 minutes, you can track results almost as they happen.

Tracking Leads From Other Sources

Unfortunately, Salesforce Group Edition isn't integrated in the same way with other PPC ad services, such as Microsoft adCenter and Yahoo Search Marketing; though you certainly can use Salesforce Group Edition with these services, the reports aren't as complete. However, you can also employ the service to track other leads, such as telephone inquiries, e-mail, trade shows, and referrals from other Web sites.