I made an initial post on this topic a couple weeks ago; now that I've had some more experience I'll give you some more details, what I like, what needs work, my $.02 on what could be improved.

How it’s implemented

Settings/Business Management has a new link, Internet Marketing, where you go to request activation. When you request activation, you actually have to use an additional account. If you’ve got extra (unused) accounts, it will create one for you – “Internet Marketing User” – but if you don’t, you actually have to add a new user. You have to pay for the user, too, but they end up crediting the monthly fee against anything you spend on advertising. So…unless you’re planning on actually spending some advertising dollars, don’t activate!

Once you activate, you create a new Campaign, and there’s a new Campaign Type: “Internet Marketing”. Select it and save your campaign, and things get different.

What’s different about this new Internet Marketing campaign type?

There’s only one kind of campaign activity: unlike in a normal campaign where you add various kinds of campaign activities and then select a channel for each one, in an Internet Marketing campaign the only kind of campaign activity is an Internet ad campaign.

When you create and then edit that campaign activity, the UI is outside of CRM. It’s essentially a wizard UI that goes up against the MS AdCenter site, where you can create Ad Groups and Ads, bid on Keywords to drive traffic for your campaign, and create the landing pages those keywords will drive traffic to. Here’s what you see when you  

After you create a campaign activity (set up your ads, purchase your keywords, create the landing pages and point your ads to those landing pages), then you’ll see new links from your campaign form: under Marketing you’ll see Landing Pages, and under Sales you’ll see Internet Leads. When somebody sees your ad, clicks on it and goes to the landing page, fills out the form and clicks submit, they become an “Internet Lead”. What you do is review these incoming Internet Leads, select the ones you want to import, and import them. Once you do this, they become “real” CRM lead records.

What’s good about it?

It integrates directly into your CRM Online. One of the best things about it is how easy it is to set up very nice looking landing pages. Lots of marketing and sales managers don’t necessarily have the savvy or permissions to create their own landing pages, but in the MS Internet Marketing model, you use a template-driven approach to create pages that CRM Online will host for you, so it’s pretty easy.

If a lead comes in from an Internet Ad associated with your campaign, it is automatically associated with the campaign as a campaign response. So if you ultimately convert it to an Opportunity and close it as a sale, you get real closed loop marketing and can measure campaign ROI.

If you don’t have lots of (or any!) experience with purchasing Google Ad Words or MS Ad Center keywords, the “direct from CRM marketing campaign” UI presented in this approach gives you an easy entry into Internet Advertising.   

What’s missing?

Currently the only kind of campaign activity that gets you the “closed loop” marketing functionality is a real Microsoft adCenter ad.  You can drive traffic to your landing pages from anywhere – your own web site, Google ad words, an email campaign – but if you use any of those non-adCenter approaches you don’t get any tracking back to the source. All you get in any of those cases is a lead record that has a Lead Source value of “Internet Marketing”. It doesn’t create a campaign response record, and there doesn’t seem to be any way of telling (from with CRM Online, anyway) where it came from, which landing page they went to, or anything else.

The integration with adCenter is incomplete. For example, you authenticate to your CRM Online site with a Windows Live id. And when you edit your campaign activity from within CRM Online you can do it without authenticating again, with your Windows Live id. But if you go into adCenter and try to use your Windows Live id…sorry! You have to create another account specifically for adCenter. Just what you need: another user name and password to remember!

You can only create three landing pages, and each landing page you create is associated with every one of your Internet Marketing campaigns! So at first I thought I could get around the “adCenter” only restriction by having different  campaigns, each with their own landing page…but that doesn’t work.

How could it be improved?

Let you create your own Landing Pages, as many as you want, and each one creates its own Internet Lead records. Essentially, there should be a Landing Page entity, and an Internet Lead entity, and a 1:N relationship from Landing Page to Internet Lead.

If this worked, you could create campaign activities independently of the landing pages, and simply point your ads to landing pages, or include links in your emails or from web pages, etc., to those landing pages.

Then, if you could add a Landing Page record to a Campaign (1:N from Campaign to Landing Page), any submit from a Landing Page could be recorded as a Campaign Response. This would be the way to go! This would let you do a very general Internet Marketing. Or maybe better yet would be to have a 1:N from Campaign Activity to Landing Page. This way, you could have campaigns with something like the following structure:

·         Campaign Activity 1: AdCenter ad

o   Links drive traffic to Landing Page 1

·         Campaign Activity 2: Google ad

o   Links drive traffic to Landing Page 2

·         Campaign Activity 3: Email blast

o   Link 1 drives traffic to Landing Page 3

o   Link 2 drives traffic to Landing Page 4

o   Link 3 drives traffic to …you get the picture

With this structure, you could have submits from those landing pages create Campaign Response records, each of which could be tied to everything you need: the campaign, the campaign activity, and the specific landing page they came from.

In Summary

It’s a great start…but needs some work to really give you full-blown and flexible closed-loop Internet marketing. I guess the primary limitation is that it forces you to treat an Internet Marketing campaign as a standalone thing, rather than integrating Internet marketing with the rest of your marketing activities.  

Richard Knudson -- richardk@imginc.com