Since Salesforce.com rolled out their Adwords integration in 2007, many marketing users rushed to install the free package not knowing what the effect of this integration will have on their Adwords account. If you’re using the Optimize Ad Rotation method to run your ads in Google (i.e: Optimize: Show better performing ads more often) you MUST read on to see how this can impact you.
As it turns out, as soon as you switch on the integration, Salesfore immediately modifies ALL your Adwords destination urls by adding extra tracking parameters similar to: _kk={Keyword}&_kt=3379166f-49a0-431d-a20c-7805d06fa958. These tracking parameters are necessary because they allow Salesforce to record the keyword, search term, ad group etc.. that the lead used to find your site and register.
However, in Adwords when you modify an ad in any way, Google considers it as a completely new ad and erases the history you’ve collected and resets your ad to zero. If you have many ads running and selected to Optimize the Ad Rotation then Google should be showing ads with better click thru rate (CTR) more often than others. As time goes by, your better performing ads will get higher position because the CTR positively affects the Quality Score of the Ad. So resetting all the ads by changing the url will feel as if you just launched Adwords for the first time and Google has no history of your Ad performance. Salesforce warns that it takes a day for the account to get back to normal but for large Adwords accounts, only a few hours of running the wrong ads might be costly.
The only solution i found to solve part of this problem is the following:
– Run a historical Ad Performance, export it to .csv
– Highlight the worse performing ads who were getting low % serving and low CTR
– Go through your Ad Groups and pause the low performing ads.
This is not an ideal solution but at least you don’t lose impressions, clicks and in turn conversions. Also, you don’t have to wait for Google to rotate all your ads to rediscover which are the better performing ones.
Please comment on this blog if you found a better solution.
