Integrating Odoo CRM & Google Ads: Benefits, Workflows & Methods

Integrating Odoo CRM and Google Ads is a powerful solution to manage marketing data across multiple platforms. Odoo CRM provides powerful CRM features, and Google Ads lets you design and monitor focused marketing efforts. Integrating these two platforms may require effort, but it will greatly enhance your ability to monitor your business marketing performance.

We have explored the common workflows and three popular methods for the integration. These resources will help you select the most suitable approach that fits your specific business needs.

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Leading Business Solutions: Odoo CRM & Google Ads

Odoo is an open-source business solution with a suite of modules that are fully integrated and customisable for resource planning such as Sales, Manufacturing, HRM, Inventory, Purchase, etc. One of the modules is Odoo CRM - a comprehensive Customer Relationship Management software for businesses of all sizes.

• Mobile CRM: Provide an intuitive mobile interface to control your CRM tasks and data while on the road.
• Automated Lead Capture: Gather leads automatically from emails, social media, websites, and other sources.
• Lead Nurturing & Scoring: Set up automated campaigns and assign lead scores that meet established rules.
• Sales Pipeline Management: Use a drag-and-drop interface to visualise your pipeline, personalise the stages, and identify areas for development.
• Opportunity Management: Get a complete perspective of the customer lifecycle by managing the calls, activities, and next steps for every opportunity.
• Customer Relationship Management: Keep a consolidated address book, note client preferences, and retrieve customer records.
• Marketing Automation Integration: Improve lead generation and nurturing tactics by integrating with email platforms.
• Reporting & Analytics: Evaluate sales funnel, prospects, leads, and marketing campaign efficiency with pre-made dashboards or custom reports.
• Teamwork: Work with the sales team, and share filters within a single dashboard.
• Effortless Integrations: Combine Odoo CRM with other Odoo modules such as Sales, Inventory, and Email Marketing.

As is known, Google Ads is an efficient online advertising tool within the Google solution ecosystem. It allows businesses to create advertisements that appear on Google's search engine results pages (SERPs) and across its advertising network. 

Advertisers bid on keywords to display their ads in search results or run display ads that can appear on partner websites, mobile apps, and YouTube.

While Odoo has a powerful CRM platform, Google Ads helps users reach new audiences, produce quality leads, and increase conversions. This is how Google Ads play important roles such as:

• Allow businesses to target their ads to specific audiences based on keywords, location, demographics, interests, and behaviours.
• Help businesses reach a global audience.
• Let advertisers measure performance, refine their strategies, and improve ROI.
• Enable businesses to reconnect with potential customers who have shown interest in their products or services.

Benefits Of Integrating Odoo CRM With Google Ads

When you integrate Odoo CRM with Google Ads, your lead-generation process becomes smoother. It helps your sales and marketing teams collaborate effectively and gives you better insights into your marketing ROI. Let's go through the key reasons showing that Odoo Google Ads integration can revolutionise your marketing efforts:

1. Automated lead capture & reduced manual work

According to a Forbes study, to handle CRM-related duties more efficiently, sales reps spend 9.1% of their time - more than half of it - on spreadsheets.

Manually importing leads from Google Ads forms into your Odoo CRM can be a time-consuming chore. Following the Forbes study, one of the best solutions to get the CRM frustration out of reps is to integrate it in better ways. By integrating Odoo and Google Ads, you can automate lead capture, eliminating this burden and freeing up valuable time for your team. This allows them to focus on more strategic work:

• Enhance productivity by paying more attention to closing deals and nurturing leads than data input.
• Increase data accuracy by ensuring consistency and removing human errors.
• Speeding up lead follow-up by enabling sales to get back to prospects more quickly.

2. Improved marketing & sales collaboration

Sales and marketing typically work in silos and hinder marketing effectiveness. Integrating Odoo CRM with Google Ads bridges this gap and establishes a smoother connection. This breaks down data silos, providing both teams with a unified view of the customer journey. Specifically, sales reps have access to comprehensive lead data to tailor their approach, while marketing can identify which initiatives generate high-quality leads:

• Marketing generates high-quality leads with a higher conversion rate, improving sales output.
• Sales teams better target their communications for best performance with deeper insights into customers. This is important, as a great number of customers (72% of a study's respondents) claim to only interact with well-personalised messages.
• Sales and marketing collaborate to drive revenue growth, which is their shared objective.

3. Seamless conversion journey

Disjointed interactions can easily lose potential customers. Integrating Odoo CRM and Google Ads streamlines the buyer journey, transforming it from Google Ads conversions to Odoo CRM leads. For example, as a result of data sharing between two platforms, someone clicks on your ads, submits your pre-built ad form, and quickly gets a response from a salesperson who is using Odoo CRM. This seamless experience builds trust and boosts conversion rates:

• Increase conversion rates with more leads completing desired actions when they have a hassle-free, personalised customer journey.
• Enhance brand perception and customer loyalty with a satisfying user experience. PwC reported that 73% of all customers emphasise the importance of the customer experience in their purchasing decisions.
• Improve customer lifetime value (CLV) by promoting repurchases and fostering stronger connections with your customers.

4. Actual ROI tracking in marketing

Data-driven companies are demonstrably more successful - according to McKinsey & Company, they're 19 times more likely to maintain profitability and 23 times more likely to attract new clients. 

Measuring marketing ROI can be a challenge with traditional methods and separate systems. However, actual ROI insights can be obtained with custom Google Ads and Odoo integration. Through the integration of the ads performance data with Odoo sales data, you can figure out the precise amount of profit generated by each ad campaign:

• Optimise your campaign spending by directing resources to the activities that generate the greatest returns and dismissing those that fail.
• Show that your marketing is effective by providing stakeholders with data-driven results that demonstrate the worth of your marketing initiatives.
• Make decisions based on data to optimise your marketing approach.

4 Common Workflows Of Odoo CRM & Google Ads Integration

Integrating Odoo CRM with Google Ads establishes powerful automation for lead generation, conversion tracking, and remarketing. The following are a few popular workflows that you can apply:

1. Automate lead capture

This is the most common workflow among businesses that want to establish a connection between Odoo CRM and Google Ads. It eliminates manual entry and the risk of lost leads:

• Trigger: Prospects click on your ads and submit your pre-built ad form such as book a free consultation or trial, or get a quote.
• Action: With every form submission, Odoo immediately adds a new lead record to your CRM. Name, phone number, email, and any additional data in the form are all captured in this record.

This integration eliminates manual data entry, ensuring every lead is captured for further action. When the leads are automatically captured, you can utilise features including the predictive lead scoring feature of Odoo CRM. This enables salespeople to concentrate on the greatest opportunities and prioritise leads based on their potential worth.

2. Track campaign conversion

While Odoo CRM doesn't offer a pre-built dashboard specifically for displaying Google Ads campaign data, custom integration bridges this gap. This approach involves developing a custom tracking dashboard or integrating directly with the Odoo CRM dashboard. The custom integration allows Odoo users to schedule data retrievals and create customisable reports:

• Trigger: Odoo automatically retrieves performance data from ads regularly (i.e. weekly). 
• Action: The data is updated within the custom dashboard.

You can utilise the custom dashboard and present the ads' performance data in a way that is easy to follow. This enables you to track the efficacy of campaigns by visualising how marketing techniques affect CRM metrics in real-time and pinpointing areas for improvement.

3. Automate lead retargeting

This custom workflow integrates your Odoo CRM lead status with Google Ads audience lists automatically. In simple terms, it enables you to design retargeting campaigns that are specifically tailored to the leads at each stage of your sales funnel within Odoo CRM:

• Trigger: A lead's status switches from A to B within Odoo CRM (i.e., from ‘’qualified’’ to ‘‘opportunity’’ or “won’’).
• Action: Based on the lead's status, the custom flow automatically updates the lead data to a matching audience list in Google Ads. For instance, when an opportunity is moved to "won" in Odoo CRM, the lead data is updated to your Google Ads "customer" list.

This enables you to develop retargeting initiatives that are specifically tailored for multiple customer segments. Ads are displayed to "won" opportunities which can encourage repeat business or service upsell.

4. Automate offline conversion tracking

Many companies use CRM systems to track sales that they close offline. It is challenging to determine the actual efficacy of your advertising campaigns as Google Ads cannot see this offline data. This is where the offline tracking comes in handy.

• Trigger: When the sales staff closes a deal in Odoo CRM and marks it as "won".
• Action: If the deal’s lead is identified to come from an ad campaign, its data will automatically be sent back to your Ads account. This information could include specifics like the date and sale value.

With this offline conversion data, you can determine the actual contribution of your Ads campaign to your business sales. This lets you refine future advertising efforts to get more quality leads with a higher conversion rate - both online and offline.

3 Typical Integration Approaches

By connecting your Odoo CRM and Google Ads, you can get useful data insights and optimise your marketing processes. We have summarised three popular integration approaches, each with benefits and drawbacks of its own:

1. Manual data exporting (CSV files)

Using CSV to transfer data manually from Odoo to Google Ads is the simplest method. There is no particular setup needed for this procedure. Both Google Ads' data import features and Odoo's data export features are available to you. It only requires you to:

• Export data from Odoo or Google Ads (such as leads or sales) in a CSV file. These options can be found easily within Odoo CRM or Google Ads dashboard. 
• Import data for Google Ads or Odoo within your Google Ads or Odoo CRM and choose importing options.

What are the benefits?

• Easy to set up; no technological expertise required.
• No cost to utilise.

What are the drawbacks?

• Laborious and prone to mistakes, particularly when dealing with big datasets.
• Because data is not automatically updated, you need to regularly perform manual exports and imports.
• Limited capability in contrast to custom integrations.

2. Custom integration with Google Ads webhooks

This method requires using the Google webhooks to create a basic interaction between Odoo and Google Ads. Webhooks are the key element that triggers automated data flow between the two systems when an event occurs in your Ads. You can read documents from Google and get online tools to help you with the process. This method requires you to:

Configure Webhooks in Google Ads. Go to the webhook settings in Google Ads and specify the events (like a new lead) that you want to trigger notifications. Set the Odoo CRM endpoint's URL where the webhook data will be received.

Establish an Odoo Endpoint. To receive and handle the webhook data from Google Ads, you must establish an endpoint within your Odoo CRM. This requires some technical know-how. Building scripts to manage data processing and interaction with Odoo is required for this endpoint.

What are the benefits?

• Real-time data synchronisation makes sure that the most recent Google Ads data shows up in your Odoo CRM.
• Less manual work thanks to automated data transfer between systems.
• Greater scalability to handle bigger datasets than when exporting manually.

What are the drawbacks?

• Technical expertise is needed while working with the Odoo endpoint and setting up webhooks.
• Updating your Odoo endpoint is necessary if Google Ads or Odoo features change.
• Restricted features compared to a complete custom integration.

3. Custom workflows by professional developers

With this method, you collaborate with a custom service provider to design a unique integration solution that meets your requirements. Their team will build features into Odoo so that it can easily integrate with your Google Ads. They will assess your needs and create a unique solution, including initiatives such as:

• Scheduling Google data retrieval
• Mapping and transferring data to enable the integration
• Building custom fields within the Odoo system to enable workflow actions
• Developing complex workflows to automate campaigns for retargeting, conversion tracking, and lead collection.

What are the benefits?

• Highly customised to fit your unique requirements and procedures.
• Advanced features to make the most of the integration of Odoo CRM and Google Ads.
• Workflows are automated to simplify data flow and save time and effort.
• Scalability to effectively manage big, complicated data sets.

What are the drawbacks?

• Updating the integration may be necessary to maintain it compatible with upcoming Odoo or Google Ads releases.
• You need technical experience or service support for future updates and possible adjustments.

The Next Step

The best method for integrating Odoo CRM and Google Ads relies on your unique requirements and available resources. Think about your desired level of automation, your budget, and your technological expertise. 

We hope that you now have a better knowledge of the three common integration techniques including custom workflows by professionals, self-integration with webhooks, and manual data export. By carefully evaluating these options against your unique situation, you can make an informed decision that optimises the integration's potential and significantly enhances your marketing efforts.

References:

• Google Ads Help. About lead form assets
• Google Ads Help. About offline conversion imports
• McKinsey & Company (2014). Five facts: How customer analytics boosts corporate performance
• PwC (2018). Experience is everything: Here’s how to get it right
• Forbes (2018). Why Sales Reps Spend Less Than 36% Of Time Selling (And Less Than 18% In CRM).