How can I track in Google AdWords which keywords send leads that turn into customers?

How are you tracking and following up on your leads? A good CRM will enable you to capture the source and campaign details of your leads. Then once you've closed those leads, you can pull a report on those customers to look at the keywords. It is probably not likely that you'll be able to do this retroactively. However, just because you can track something, doesn't mean it's worth spending time on. Unless you are dealing with 100's or more like 1000's of customers per month, it will likely be of no value to analyze your ROI per unique keyword. I have done this analysis a few times, and each time my general conclusion is this: 80% of your sales will come from completely unique keywords. The other 20% come from the generic obvious catch-all terms for your business or service. Also compounding this is that Google now lumps much of the keyword traffic under (Not Provided) so it makes the above analysis even more questionable. If you are running a robust paid search campaign you will have more keyword data to play with but my above maxim stands.  (It will be more useful to analyze your ROI by the campaigns, or ad group concepts.) Hope that helps!

If you're already using Google Analytics, the best way to track which keywords send leads that turn into customers is to http://zuev.software/crm-and-google-analytics-integration/. Here is a sample report that uses sales data automatically imported from CRM to Google Analytics: Columns highlighted with yellow were generated using offline data. ComparisonThis approach is better than just saving keywords to CRM. A user may see your banner ad, and in 20 days find you again with Google and make a purchase: If all you do is save the UTM parameters of the last visit to your CRM, you might think that banner ads are not effective, while in reality they may be the reason for 80% of your conversions. - The user might have never searched for your product on Google if it wasn't for your banner ads.

I'd say there's two ways to get the data you want. One. You could look into fully integrated systems, like HubSpot. You'll be able to link the source all the way to the sale. Two. You could go semi-automated using your current systems. I manage the PPC campaigns for a client that uses Zoho docs. They use the API to input all the leads. Via a manual action the sales team input the sale data next to the automatic imported lead data (including keyword).

This is exactly why we created our tool Convertable. It automatically tracks the source of every single web lead as well as stores the lead and analytics data within an online dashboard so you can update the status of the lead throughout the sales cycle. It is also worth mentioning that Convertable tracks the source, keyword, location, pages viewed, time spent on site, etc. for every single visit that a user makes to the site before submitting a form so you can instantly see which traffic sources/campaigns should be credited with generating the lead (multi-touch attribution rather than first/last-click). Feel free to check out http://Convertable.com or some of our blog posts below - http://convertable.com/blog/how-to-figure-out-which-lead-was-generated-by-which-conversion/ http://convertable.com/blog/how-convertable-is-different-from-google-analytics/

How do customers actually pay you? If the transaction occurs online, consider using an advanced analytics tool like Mixpanel or KISSmetrics. Basically you set up an event called "purchased" and then you segment that by keyword. Assuming you're tagging all your Adwords urls with UTM parameters, both analytics tools will be able to pick that up. It's like saying "show me all the people who made a purchase, according to the utm_term they used." You can also do the same with traffic sources, and other events. "Show me all the people who purchased, using a 20% off coupon, and came from Twitter" So yes, you'll be able to figure out the true ROI of each keyword this way.