Nick McSpadden has a great (and thorough) write-up on Deploying and Managing Google Chrome: The Rough Guide, and his recommendation is to have some initial Master Preferences that set a default, which can be overriden.

In some cases, though (for example, we have some machines that will be used for Hour of Code next week that will be set to code.org/learn as the homepage), you may want to force the homepage, in which case a profile may be the way to do it. There’s a great template for a Chrome profile on JAMF Nation. Just paste that into a text file, edit it, and then save it with a .mobileconfig extension, and then you can distribute the .mobileconfig using Munki or ARD.