Online Marketing Blog

SalesForce.com and SEO Names

In a rare moment of vanity-search weakness (yeah right!), I Googled my name (Lee Odden) and was surprised to see an AdWords ad from salesforce.com. I am not sure why they would do that as there are so many other people in search marketing whose names are searched on more frequently, are well known, more prominent in the industry, etc.

Out of curiosity I started plugging names into Google (50+) to see which ones would pull up more ads from salesforce.com and the only other names pulling up salesforce.com ads were Danny Sullivan and John Battelle.

This is very strange indeed as I don’t belong in the same room as those two guys. The even stranger thing was that the landing page is pure crap. There’s nothing on it. Maybe it’s salesforce.com’s call for search marketing help?

Update: Just so you think I’m not seeing things, below are screenshots.

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1. October 23rd, 2006 at 5:05 pm gigi
   

   i can only see the AdWords ad from Naymz.com now

2. October 23rd, 2006 at 5:33 pm Lee Odden
   

   Hi gigi, that’s weird as I can still see the salesforce.com ads from here. I added screenshots to the post so you can see.

3. October 23rd, 2006 at 5:46 pm Tamar Weinberg
   

   I didn’t make the ad, but I find your information pretty valuable and would put you up there with those guys.

4. October 23rd, 2006 at 6:09 pm Lee Odden
   

   That is very nice of you to say Tamar, but I’m literally light years away. Am glad the info is useful though!

5. October 23rd, 2006 at 6:29 pm Jeremy Luebke
   

   So what is your opinion on this? Is it something that upsets you or you think is unethical? It’s one of things I’m on the fence about. Even if I was for it I doubt I would actually do it due to lack of ROI.

6. October 23rd, 2006 at 6:37 pm Mark Mangano
   

   Hi Lee -

   I too see the ad. Salesforce is using it to promote their “Salesforce for Google Adwords” application that integrates Google Adwords tracking with Salesforce.com.

   The application was created by a company called Kieden (http://www.kiden.com). They were acquired by Salesforce earlier this year; I wrote about it on my Salesforce-related blog: http://www.salesforcewatch.com/2006/08/salesforce_aqui.html.

   Also, the landing page IS screwed up. It should take you here: http://www.salesforce.com/appexchange/detail_overview.jsp?id=a0330000002OM8hAAG

   – Mark

7. October 23rd, 2006 at 6:39 pm Mark Mangano
   

   Ugh - two typos on URLs!!!

   http://www.kieden

   and

   http://www.salesforcewatch.com/2006/08/salesforce_aqui.html

   Sorry about that.

8. October 23rd, 2006 at 9:37 pm gigi
   

   hi Lee.. thank you for your screenshots. This is strange… I’ve just googled Danny Sullivan and none of the sponsored links looked the same as the ones in your screenshot. Maybe its because I am using Google UK.

9. October 23rd, 2006 at 10:15 pm Lee Odden
   

   Jeremy, it would very much fall into the category of a compliment!

   Thanks for the clarification Mark.

   Incidentally, my company finally started using salesforce.com recently and we are very happy customers.

10. October 23rd, 2006 at 10:17 pm Lee Odden
    

    gigi, that does make sense. Google probably is not going to show the same ads to US based isp’s as those in Europe.

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