It has been a year and a day since the Salesforce for Google AdWords baton was passed to third-party developers and partners. While they can offer users new and improved apps that track AdWords campaigns, Salesforce can focus on enhancing its core CRM features. Click on over to the Salesforce AppExchange. There you'll see from the more than 110 reviews on Bizible, one of the six replacements, that it's more than an adequate alternate for the Salesforce for Google AdWords service.
"We decided to move up market to replace and expand on the Salesforce for Google AdWords product," says Aaron Bird, co-founder and CEO of the up-and-coming marketing analytics powerhouse. "We added a number of features so companies can track ALL marketing in Salesforce and match that with revenue."
Bizible has gone through a few iterations over the past few years as they searched for the right product for the market, always staying close to marketing ROI. Having worked at Microsoft for a number of years on the Bing Ads team, Bird and his Bizible co-founder and CTO Peter Thompson learned what marketers care about and some of the challenges they were facing.
An AdAge survey found that the greatest challenge of digital attribution measurement for U.S. marketers is matching online campaigns to online and offline conversion. Bizible makes it easy to see just that, so companies can optimize by ROI.
"Our first product, which is what got us into TechStars, was more for small local businesses to track how their online marketing was translating into in-store purchases," Bird says about the Seattle-based startup founded in 2011. "After a few months, Salesforce announced their product Salesforce for Google AdWords was to be retired. That product allowed companies to add AdWords details into Salesforce and match that with sales revenue to optimize by ROI, so a similar space."
Bird says this is what pipeline marketing is all about: moving beyond lead generation to making decisions based on business impact (revenue) instead of clicks and leads.
"The problem with lead generation is that it focuses too heavily on the top of the funnel, weighting toward quantity with little regard for quality," he says. "Once you consider this, it's not a bit surprising that only 0.75 percent of leads convert into customers according to Forrester. Pipeline marketing focuses on connecting marketing and sales data to enable decision-making based on revenue."
Bizible not only brings clarity to how marketing contributes to revenue, but it also makes it actionable. No more guessing which Facebook ad or keyword drove sales. Marketing can understand, forecast, and optimize marketing resources.
Open Colleges, a Bizible customer, was recently featured on the Salesforce blog for how they use Bizible to make profitable marketing decisions. By matching online marketing with sales data, specifically revenue, they have been able to grow inquiry volume by more than 100 percent while reducing cost per lead acquisition by 15 percent.
Here are three ways Bird explains companies like Open Colleges use Bizible to see measurable improvements to marketing performance:
- By connecting marketing and sales data and adopting pipeline marketing, companies can make decisions based on revenue instead of just leads. For example, one marketing campaign may cost more per lead. Traditional analytics would say to decrease investment in that campaign. With Bizible, you can see revenue contribution, so sometimes campaigns with higher cost per lead generate more profitable customers, and in fact you may want to increase investment.
- Bizible recently launched an Optimizely Salesforce integration. In the past, companies with sales teams were limited to form submissions to assess performance of A/B testing. Bizible's solution combined with Optimizely means that, for the first time, companies with a sales team can easily trace specific experiments to business impact.
- Finally, another use case is tracking social media content downloads. For instance, promoted ads on LinkedIn for e-book downloads make it easy to see which ads and targeting are working.
There's a lot of value for Bizible beyond helping companies track marketing in Salesforce and matching it with revenue. After a customer is closed, for example, Bird says all Bizible and Salesforce information is easily reportable. "Say you want to know how many customers are in a particular state. Done. Which browsers or computers are they are using. Done. How often they are coming back to your site to assess churn risk. Easy."
They're also about to launch an education site at pipelinemarketer.com where you can sign up to receive pipeline marketing lessons with actionable tips curated by industry experts like Matt Heinz.
According to a B2B magazine survey, 32 percent of respondents said they don't track leads to specific marketing touches. If they aren't tracking online marketing, such as content downloads from social media to leads then they are tracking it to revenue. Bizible makes it really easy, and setup takes less than 30 minutes.
Building on the product, Bizible will soon be launching a multi-touch attribution that also makes it easy for companies to compare ad performance from first click, last click, and U-shaped / position, directly in Salesforce.