Long-term benefits of integrating your CRM system with Google Ads

Every year, Australian businesses receive nearly $32 billion in advertising returns from Google Search and Ads. To say Google plays a big role in our small business ecosystem would be a gross understatement. It's likely that Google Ads has been such a success in Australia because it’s an easy way to secure leads without investing too many resources upfront. For small businesses in particular, Google Ads is often a no-brainer, and possibly, the only feasible marketing solution.

While Google Ads offers immense value by itself, integrating it with your CRM or customer data management system can help you obtain significantly more insights. For instance, based on the customer profiles stored in your CRM system, you can create a range of marketing lists on Google Ads to run re-marketing ads, display ads, and re-marketing search ads. In other words, you can create a list of people who’ve visited and read through your website, and then re-target them by placing your business’ ads on other websites they might visit. That way, you can ensure that you’re at the top of these customers' minds, and increase your chances of a conversion. To get the most benefit from your Google Ads investment, consider integrating it with your CRM.

Integrating your CRM data with Google Ads

Many CRM software vendors offer straightforward integrations with Google Ads. If your vendor doesn’t, you can import a list of selected CRM contacts directly into your Google Ads account. Alternatively, you can use an API to connect the two systems.

Your CRM and Google Ads integration can either be one-way or two-way. With a one-way integration, you’ll only share data from one system to another (CRM to Google Ads or vice versa). For example, you can send customer navigation data from your CRM to your Google Ads account and create re-targeting ads for specific customers based on their behaviour. This can help you direct your focus to warm leads, instead of spending time chasing cold leads. You can also use a one-way integration to create journey-based lists and ads. Your CRM can help you identify a lead's current stage: Awareness, consideration, purchasing, or post-purchase. Based on this information, you can create targeted ads.

In the case of a two-way integration, you’ll share data between both systems. This means that every time a lead purchases your product/service by clicking on a Google ad, Google Ads will send information, like click rates, click-through rates, button clicks and behaviour, search intent, cost per click, and other ad campaign information, directly to your CRM system.

Which format you should choose depends on the information you want to pass between the apps and what goals you want to achieve from the integration.

Benefits of integrating your CRM data with your Google Ads account

Having both your CRM and Google Ads portals communicate with each other means that you can use insights from one to inform your decisions on the other. Here are a few ways you can leverage a two-way integration:

Create effective ad campaigns

If you’ve integrated your CRM with your Google Ads account, every online and offline sale you record in your CRM system will flow to Google Ads automatically. You can use this deal conversion data to create new targeting lists for your Google Ads campaigns. You can also use specifics about a customer, such as their industry, business requirements, business size, and interest in other products, to create lookalike audience lists in Google Ads. For instance, if you run a cleaning company and you close a deal with a real estate agent for an end-of-lease cleaning, you can create a custom ad campaign to identify and convert other real estate agents. You can follow it up with a case study, imagery, testimonials, and even a landing page, all addressed specifically to real estate agencies. This extends your potential reach to a wider audience, and helps increase your success rate.

Furthermore, when you share conversion data between the two apps, Google Ads can update its ad lists accordingly, and even create whole new ad lists. Imagine that you’ve been showing re-targeting ads for a specific shampoo to a potential customer. Once they’ve purchased your product, Google Ads can move them from their existing list to a different list to be targeted with a different kind of ad, such as an ad for the conditioner that works best with the shampoo, or an ad for a fine-tooth comb.

Use existing campaign insights in your sales and marketing efforts

The data you receive from Google Ads in your CRM can inform sales conversations and marketing activities. From the first time a person clicks on your Google ad, to every subsequent re-targeting ad they’ve seen and engaged with, all the way to their purchase decision, you can follow a customer’s entire lifecycle in your CRM.

This means that you can set up email follow-ups customised to each campaign. Let’s say a potential customer clicked on your ad for a conditioner, and a day later, they clicked on another ad for your comb. With that information in your CRM, you can make an informed decision to send the potential customer resources about how your comb complements your conditioner, or extend a custom pricing offer for the combo. Even if you sell twenty other hair products, you'll know that this particular customer is only interested in the comb and conditioner, because Google Ads shared that information with you.

Based on your business and industry, you can use this information in other ways, too, such as prioritising sales calls based on lead quality or including casual banter in your sales conversations based on your lead’s behaviour. If a Sydney-based company’s representative clicked on your ad last week, but signed up with your business from overseas this morning, you could incorporate that information into your calls to build rapport.

For marketing, you can use data from Google Ads to learn more about your audience and create relevant campaigns. Google Ads will pass on details about what every lead that clicked on an ad was looking for. This means that your CRM will now have a whole lot of information about that lead, including:

• Where they came from
• Which ads they clicked on
• Which buttons they clicked on on your landing page
• How much of the page they read through
• Which other pages they visited on your website
• How warm or cold the lead is
• Which salesperson they spoke to
• The specifics of the sales conversation
• Any custom prices quoted
• Concerns the lead has raised
• How much you’ve spent on acquiring the lead
• Who's following up with that lead

… and so much more. Based on these insights, you can make big decisions about your budget, messaging, and audience. You can do more with the ads that worked, identify how much you're spending on each lead (and assess whether it's sustainable), run A/B tests on your ads and campaigns, and measure your ROI.

Measure your business’ growth

Google Ads shows your ads based on a person’s search intent. This means that Google Ads can tell you what keywords boost your ad's performance. If you offer multiple products or services, you’ll also be informed of which products get more attention, which industries find your products/services most helpful, and which audience groups buy from you the most. Having all this information fed back to your CRM system can help you measure how your longer-term goals are progressing, and even inform your marketing strategy.

Parting thoughts

Your CRM is a treasure trove of information. So is your Google Ads account. Put them together and you’ll have a powerful source of reliable data that you can leverage for your marketing and sales activities. Our own CRM software comes with a built-in Google Ads integration. Feel free to give it a test run and see how you can make it work for you.