The limited benefits of the Adwords integration into salesforce only consists in offering an interface gathering already available existing services. The value added here is far from being exceptional!

I have been personally using Google Adwords and Salesforce for a long time now and this new partnership won’t allow me to do more than what I’ve been able to do for far! Most of companies have been able to integrate and track leads generated by Adwords and at the same time optimize their bids. Furthermore the web-to-lead form function was already there before the alliance exists.
FormVester, a free application for Salesforce (available at the AppEchange directory) for example has been able to capture data from any online forms and generate them as new leads directly into Salesforce long time before the alliance was done!

So yes, nothing really new here and the entire marketing buzz around this partnership announcement may appear a bit disappointing.
However, I’m convinced that the real effects of this partnership will take its entire dimension on the next following month/years. It is obvious that both of the companies would benefit from this partnership, especially if they want to be serious competitors of Microsoft, but they need to deliver more valuable services to both Salesforce and Google users!

In particular:

1) Landing pages are critical for driving conversions and improving ranking, but 3 out of 4 companies still send clicks to the home page. Google doesn’t care because they still get paid for each click, but the marketer ends up with fewer leads. It’s just too hard to get the right IT support to have enough targeted pages, and the Google-Salesforce alliance provides no solution to this problem.

2) Bidding well is hard for most marketers, and Google-Salesforce provides no help for bid optimization. Again, this suits Google just fine since it’s in their interest to have companies over-bid, but it leaves the marketer with suboptimal results.

3) A click is just the beginning of a business sales cycle. Only 25% of the people that click on an ad and fill out a form are ready to speak with a sales rep. Companies need to put in place a relevant and patient nurturing process that guides the prospect from the research stage to being truly “sales ready”. Once again, the Google-Salesforce alliance doesn’t address this gap in the marketer’s business process.

You can read more at http://blog.marketo.com/blog/2007/06/some_gorillas_c.html.