By now, especially if you’ve been an avid reader of Goose Digital’s blogs, you’ll have a fundamental understanding of the various benefits that Marketing Automation Platforms (MAP) can provide your organization in aligning your marketing and sales efforts. Whether that is using the tool to create powerful automated nurture campaigns, or aligning your marketing and sales teams through lead quality and scoring, you understand the importance of tracking and automating your interactions with your prospects and customers at various different touchpoints. If you haven’t, or you are new to marketing automation, I would highly suggest checking out our blog section and explore the bevy of topics that we’ve written about.

Why is it worth linking my Ads campaigns to my MAP?

As a Marketing Automation agency, we see many organizations come to us to help them get the most out of their marketing automation tools, and one of the more under-utilized features (or marketers lack general awareness in) that many do not take advantage of, is the native integrations that these platforms have with their Google Ads campaigns. More often than not, many organizations treat their marketing automation tools completely separate from their Google Ads efforts. To paint you an example, they’ll use their MAP purely for list segmentation and several automated email programs with basic scoring in place; and treat their Adwords campaign and subsequent reporting totally separate from the MAP platform, thus really lacking the visibility into true ROI and what campaigns generate the most opportunities. Sound familiar? Well it really doesn’t have to be that way. For many marketing and sales leaders who are short on time, utilizing and integrating your MAP platforms with your PPC campaigns has never been easier. Regardless if you’re an organization delivering thousands of leads per day, or just starting out on Google Ads, integrating your Google Ads campaigns with your respective MAP, should be a best practice. Here, I’ll go over some benefits on why this should be done.

Many of the well known and industry leading MAP platforms such as Hubspot, Pardot and Act-On, allow you to connect your Google Ads account. Quite simply, just by doing this, your platform will display and report all your existing campaigns in your respective MAP. For the marketing and sales leader who may not be in charge of optimizing these campaigns and are looking for a quick snapshot, this is a convenient way for them to check in how their campaigns are performing without going to the intimidating dashboard of Google Ads.

Attributing Real Value to your campaign

Perhaps most importantly, one of the biggest benefits of linking your Google Ads account with your Marketing Automation Platform is the ability to report and track the true ROI of your campaigns. You will gain insight into how many of your paid campaign clicks are converting to opportunities and really deep dive into what ad copies, keywords, and campaigns are resonating with your audience.

Clear transparency on what keywords and search queries bring the most prospects and revenue.

With the combination of your respective CRM, sales and marketing leaders can track customer lifetime value with the associated unique opportunities and revenue attributed to paid search. The screenshot example above shows what keywords and search queries have generated the most unique clicks alongside how many prospects and opportunities that the organization has generated, something that is not necessarily easy to tell and separate within the Google Ads dashboard itself. As marketers, our biggest fear is spending budget for little to no results, or having plenty of ‘conversions’ but no revenue associated with it. Having insights into which keywords and campaigns generate the most opportunity value and revenue will help your efforts into making the proper optimizations on your Ads campaign. By connecting your account with your MAP will only aid in the process of identifying the relevance of your leads.

More importantly, once your organization has a good groove going on in your Ads campaigns, your integration with your MAP platforms allows you to identify and have specific communications set in place to your leads. Having the proper engagement program and workflow to deliver the right message at the right time can make all the difference in moving your well earned leads down the sales funnel.

Marketing Automation Platforms such as Hubspot, allow you to create an audience list based on who has visited your website and landing pages.

For those of you who experience longer sales cycles, most MAP’s will allow you to create targeted audience lists based on the clicks and queries that have brought people to your landing pages. With the simple addition of adding a pixel tracker to your pages, you will be able to create a specific audience from your website visitors so you can re-engage your leads whether that is through a remarketing campaign, or across other channels if you are advertising on LinkedIn or Facebook as an example.

If you are looking to get more use out of your PPC and Marketing Automation efforts, or if you’re having trouble attributing real ROI value to your paid media efforts, please feel free to reach out to our team. Contact us here.