by Sarah Kelleher 
Google AdWords is a great way to drive new traffic to your site and, for e-commerce businesses, it’s very easy to track your return and calculate the ROI.
But as soon as that transaction goes offline, when a salesperson picks up the phone or goes for a meeting, AdWords can no longer track that revenue.
Enter CRM and Marketing Automation! By hooking up Google AdWords to your Marketing Automation platform, you can track visitors from the ad click all the way through to closed business as both visitor data and sales data from your CRM feed back into one place.
Tools like Pardot and Salesforce allow you to attribute revenue to individual campaigns and ads, tracking the customer journey both online and offline. So you can budget more effectively and assess your revenue in a more meaningful way.
When someone visits your site from an AdWords ad, marketing automation captures the ad data and associates it with the visitor. When the visitor becomes a lead (by filling out a contact form), marketing automation puts a name to the anonymous data.
When your salesperson finally closes that lead – whether it be tomorrow or a month after the day they first clicked on your ad – they enter the sale information (volume, price, etc.) in your CRM or marketing automation system. The system attributes the sale to the exact ad and cost-per-click that brought the customer to your site.