Not all conversions are equal. For businesses that generate leads closed by a sales team, one of the most overlooked methods of unlocking a new tier of Google Ads performance is offline conversion tracking.
By uploading data from a customer database that matches the online click identifier, businesses can tell Google which conversions went on to become paying customers. And Google can use its vast stores of data to identify the shared traits among those conversions to find more people like them.
While ecommerce businesses have the benefit of conversions being clear-cut product sales that can only be impacted by two events (returns and exchanges), lead-generation conversions do not generate any revenue when they take place.
This opens up questions such as:
Every business has different needs. So, in this guide to offline conversion tracking, I’ll provide frameworks that will allow you to find the answers to these questions. We’ll cover:
Offline conversions are growing in popularity with all types of advertisers.
For ecommerce, it lets you factor in events that might change the value of a sale, such as returns and exchanges.
Lead generation businesses (like SaaS and home contractors) get to tell Google which online conversions ended up becoming revenue-contributing customers.
Other advantages of implementing offline conversion tracking include:
Offline conversion tracking can be less than straightforward to set up, but the effort is worth it.
Here are some things to keep in mind as you put it in place.
There are three ways to bring offline conversions into your Google Ads account.
Manually import offline conversion data from a number of sources.
Depending on where the conversion originated, Google uses different identifiers to match your offline conversion with its online one.
Conversions from clicks use:
Conversions from calls use:
Two of the most popular CRM tools on the market have native integrations with Google Ads.
Once this is set up, you can create rules to automatically send your funnel conversion events back into Google Ads as offline imports.
For all other CRMs and other types of customer database tools, you’ll need to set up an integration via Zapier.
Recommended Reading: Learn more about setting up offline conversion imports and integrations.
Sometimes, importing or syncing your offline conversions results in an error or doesn’t have the intended impact on performance.
There are several reasons why this happens, but most common among them are:
Recommended Reading: Learn more about offline conversion errors in Google Ads.
Setting up offline conversions involves more than just feeding information back to Google.
Here’s some advice on how paid media teams (especially agencies) can deal with the friction that can manifest during the process.
When we onboard a new lead-gen client, what I like to do is ask them for access to their CRM and customer data.
This could be HubSpot, SalesForce, or another tool that needs to be connected through Zapier. I also look for call tracking, chatbots, and landing pages.
After that, it’s a two-step process:
There’s no “best” CRM for Google Ads, and we typically can work with whatever a client uses.
That being said, I’ve been recommending HubSpot to clients who didn’t have a CRM before our involvement.
It has a free plan, scales well, and connects to Google Ads natively.
Once that’s in place, we make sure the converted leads are landing in HubSpot or whichever platform they’re using.
With conversion actions set up in Google Ads, we sync those back to the ads platform – one event for each step of the milestone.
If we track phone calls, form submissions, and chats as conversion events, each of those will drop the lead into the CRM with a GCLID.
Once a lead progresses from prospect to marketing-qualified or sales-qualified lead, we’ll send that as another conversion action back to Google Ads.
This tells Google that the lead it got just turned into a more valuable asset.
As these values populate in Google Ads against the different milestones, we start to use target return on ad spend (ROAS) bidding for lead-gen.
When clients are hesitant to share access to tools and information, it can limit an agency’s potential to deliver results.
As part of our sales process, we tell prospects that we can manage Google Ads without this support, and our focus will be leads – but if they want to focus on quality leads, this is what we’ll need from them.
Most of them are okay with sharing what we ask for; sometimes, we’ll need to sign an NDA.
But generally, clients are happy to do what will be more profitable, especially since we do the heavy lifting of setup and maintenance.
If you’re using offline conversions, you have to be in sync with the sales team, whose job is to turn leads into deals.
During a kickoff call, we try to understand what their sales process looks like.
This allows us to map out the offline conversion funnel properly, and it identifies gaps in messaging and process.
We look for what might improve close rates and then pass that on as a recommendation.
While it takes time and effort to implement offline conversion tracking correctly, doing so pays dividends long after the process is complete and automated.
With more of Google Ads campaign management being handled by the platform itself – such as real-time bidding and keyword matching – high-quality data is often the difference between average and above-average results.
In today’s digital advertising ecosystem, it’s the closest thing an account has to a tailored suit: something that allows it to enjoy the perfect fit (or as close to it as possible).
However, the biggest advantage of offline conversions is not found in metrics like CPC and ROAS. It’s the ability to generate a higher percentage of ad conversions that require less effort, time, and money to turn into revenue.
In other words, offline conversion tracking increases the long-term profitability of most ad campaigns by a noticeable degree.
More resources:
Featured Image: BestForBest/Shutterstock
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