Some may recall my whining about a month back about all the work it took to get Salesforce.com and Google Adwords integration up and running. The endgame was that there were some problems on my side with a PERL script we use, but it went farther than that - I was editing the script correctly but the FTP tool I was using would corrupt it on the upload… Enough with the propeller head stuff - how does it work?

It rocks much harder than I thought it would. Not only can I now track keywords directly back to the individual leads that they generate there’s another unintended benefit: the SF code tracks ALL referrals. Most visitors to your site will leave a record in your log files about where they came from - the referrer. For example if you followed a click from my blog to Amazon, my homey JB would see that you came from the Ronin’s dojo.

So the killer bonus is that this salesforce code is appending ALL of the referring links. Let’s say one of my execs gets an article placed in an online publication, if someone reads that pub and then comes to my site and requests a white paper, when that lead is added to salesforce there’s a record in the history that shows the link from the publication where it came from. I’ve gone from knowing from where around 40% of the leads came from with a questionable degree of certainty up to 90% with the actual referring URL. Not bad for slapping a few lines of code into the site template.

Now if I could only upgrade to enterprise so I could get the API to play with that data…