Salesforce.com unveils Google marketing tool
Firm buys small startup as it looks to help customers manage ads — LOS ANGELES (MarketWatch) — Business-software provider Salesforce.com Inc. on Tuesday unveiled a new service that allows its customers to create and manage search-engine marketing campaigns …
Context & Ripple Effects
The launch lands amid a stretch of stories about how much power Google's rankings hold over businesses: an Atlanta entrepreneur reported his company's site nearly unfindable on a Google search, and commentary compared Google's market position to the Austrian Empire's in Napoleonic-era Europe. If search placement can make or break a company, managing paid search campaigns becomes an operational need for every customer Salesforce serves.
Salesforce.com's answer is product-shaped rather than rhetorical: a new service that lets its customers create and manage search-engine marketing campaigns from within its business-software suite, built on a small startup acquisition announced the same day.
First-order effects
- Salesforce.com's customers gain in-house tools to create and manage search-engine marketing campaigns, removing a task previously handled through separate channels.
- The acquired startup's technology and team are folded into Salesforce.com's on-demand platform rather than operating independently.
Second-order effects
- Standalone search-marketing tools and agencies face a competitor embedded in the system where companies already track their customers, pressuring them to integrate with CRM platforms themselves.
- Google stands to benefit either way, since every campaign Salesforce customers build is demand for search ads — giving the dominant search player more advertiser volume flowing through its auction.
Third-order effects
- If business-software vendors keep absorbing ad management, the boundary between CRM systems and advertising channels blurs, with platforms that hold customer data becoming intermediaries for ad spend.
- For companies dependent on search visibility, competitive advantage shifts from knowing how to run campaigns to whose platform runs them — reinforcing the gatekeeper position commentators already attribute to Google in 2006.
The trend: Business-software vendors are folding search-advertising management into their suites, moving ad-buying decisions into the platforms that already own customer relationships.