Google and Salesforce Tightly Integrate Adwords Products
There's been a lot of speculation about Salesforce and Google lately. Tomorrow the two companies will announce a marketing and distribution alliance that will tightly bind Google Adwords to existing Salesforce tools that track sales from online advertising.
Context & Ripple Effects
The speculation that ran through the May coverage — the Associated Press and the Wall Street Journal reporting the two companies were discussing an alliance framed as a way to battle Microsoft — resolves tomorrow into a concrete product move rather than a partnership of intent. It is also not a cold start: Salesforce had already unveiled a Google marketing tool back in August 2006, so this alliance formalizes and deepens a working relationship that has been building for the better part of a year.
What changes with the announcement is tightness of coupling: AdWords stops being a separate buy that Salesforce tools merely observe and becomes bound directly into the tools that track which online ads turn into closed sales. The same day brings the first joint product release and a strategic global alliance announcement from both camps, making this the most committed step yet in the pairing.
First-order effects
- Salesforce's customer base gains native AdWords integration, letting marketers run campaigns and trace them to revenue inside one system instead of stitching two vendors together.
- Google gets distribution for AdWords deep into Salesforce's installed base of business users, reinforcing its lead in paid search at the point where budgets are decided.
Second-order effects
- Microsoft, explicitly named as the target of the alliance talks in the Wall Street Journal's May reporting, faces pressure to answer with tighter ad-to-CRM bundling around its own Dynamics line.
- Other CRM and advertising-platform rivals must now compete against a combined workflow rather than two separate products, pushing the market toward bundled ad-plus-tracking deals.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, CRM systems become the control layer for online ad spending, shifting leverage toward whoever owns the sales record — and making platform-level alliances between ad networks and SaaS vendors a standard competitive weapon.
The trend: Advertising platforms and CRM/SaaS vendors are consolidating around integrated bundles, turning ad buying and sales tracking into a single vendor relationship.