Tuesday, August 19, 2025

ActiveCampaign + Google Ads for B2B: close the attribution gap with Spectacle

Vincent Gaemers

Google Ads and ActiveCampaign Integration

Google Ads reports clicks and web events. ActiveCampaign holds the truth on people and revenue. Without a live bridge between them, you optimise for forms and not for customers. Budgets drift to cheap leads. Sales blames marketing data. Marketing cannot prove impact.

The fix is simple. Send lifecycle signals from ActiveCampaign into Spectacle. Let Spectacle link those signals back to Google Ads clicks and spend. Use that joined data to measure real ROI at campaign, ad group, and keyword level. Then feed it back into Ads for bidding and targeting.

No CSVs. No zaps. No dev tickets.

How Spectacle closes the loop

Capture the click

Spectacle captures Google click identifiers (or FBCLID, LI_FAT_ID's etc.) on the first visit and all other visits. Your existing UTM scheme stays intact. Nothing is overwritten.

Join with people and companies

In Spectacle, connect ActiveCampaign. Pick the contact field that holds your internal user id if you have one. Pick the company id field to group contacts into accounts.

Select any extra contact and account fields you want to sync for filtering and reporting:

Complete ActiveCampaign tracking

Spectacle automatically captures key activities in your ActiveCampaign account:

  • New contacts and contact updates

  • Account creation and changes

  • Deal creation and stage movements

Each activity gets linked back to the original marketing touchpoint when possible. This creates a clear path from your first ad interaction to final conversion. See the Active Campaign Integration docs for full reference of our sync.

Connected data for better insights

Your contact, company, and deal information flows together in Spectacle. This gives you the flexibility to:

  • Build precise audience segments Based on any combination of contact, company, or deal characteristics

  • Create custom reports with any data combination that show true ROI from ad spend to revenue

  • Track complete customer journeys across all touchpoints from awareness to conversion and beyond

You can select any custom property or additional field you use in ActiveCampaign to send to Spectacle.

Smart Attribution & Data Connections

Every tracked event is automatically linked back to the original advertising touchpoint that generated it. This creates a complete customer journey map from first ad click to final conversion.

Spectacle connects contact, company, and deal data through associations, ensuring all related information flows seamlessly between objects. This unified approach means you can analyze any property across all touchpoints.

Automated Google Ads Ad Spend Import

Connect your Google Ads account to import ad spend. Spectacle imports cost data so you can now see spend against leads, pipeline, and revenue in one place. Attribute to the touchpoints that matter. Spectacle aligns revenue to the touchpoints that led to it.

The key is that revenue appears where the journey began and where it meaningfully progressed.

Choose the attribution model that best fits your business:

  • First Touch Attribution

    - Credit the initial discovery moment

  • Last Touch Attribution

    - Focus on the final converting touchpoint

  • Simple Multi-Touch

    - Distribute credit evenly across all interactions

  • U-Shaped Model

    - Emphasize both discovery and conversion moments

The contact to deal to audience loop

You get three compounding gains.

One. Clarity Campaigns are ranked by the customers they create, not just the clicks they buy. You see waste and you see winners. You can stop arguing about lead quality because the deals speak for themselves.

Two. Optimisation Because clicks and revenue are joined, you can send the right conversions back to Google Ads. That lets Smart Bidding aim for the outcomes that matter. This is the focus of post two.

Three. Targeting You can sync audiences built from ActiveCampaign segments and Spectacle filters into Google Ads. That lets you retarget people who are warm and exclude people who already pay you. This is the focus of post three.