Boosting Your ROI: Mastering Google Ads Offline Conversions Tracking

Boosting Your ROI: Mastering Google Ads Offline Conversions Tracking

What is Offline Conversion Tracking?

Offline conversion tracking refers to a method marketers use to identify sales, subscriptions, and other actions occurring outside of your website. Examples include enrollments in a course, funded deals, starting a paid plan after a trial and phone purchases. UTM codes help marketers to track online and offline conversions, making attributing sales to marketing and PPC ad campaigns seamless. The purpose of tracking offline conversions is to eliminate the data gaps and guesswork.

Benefits of Offline Conversion Tracking

Tracking offline conversions enables you to monitor how consumers move through your sales funnel, ultimately allowing you to improve the customer’s journey and even personalize it. For instance, if your buyers are using email coupon codes for making in-store purchases, then the strategy is worth keeping. Further, using data from offline conversions can enhance customer experience and potentially boost your sales.

Offline conversion tracking is possible using Google Ads, Microsoft Ads, and Facebook Ads. And they work similarly, and each provides a unique ID (Microsoft Click ID or GCLID on Google), which monitors clicks to your landing page from an ad.

Why Offline Conversions Are Worth The Effort

Offline conversions are increasing in popularity with all types of advertisers, and for e-commerce, it lets you factor in events that might change the value of a sale, like returns and exchanges. Lead generation businesses, such as SaaS and home contractors, get to tell Google which online conversions ended up becoming revenue-contribution customers. Furthermore, other advantages of implementing offline conversion tracking include building more accurate campaigns that reflect true business goals, enabling you to include or exclude instances where conversion changes after its final interaction with Google’s pixel, reducing reliance on attribution models, directing bidding & targeting algorithms, and optimizing for profit by bidding to value on margins and final conversions.   

Offline Conversion Tracking 101

To bring offline conversions into your Google Ads account, you first need to manually import offline conversion data from several sources. Google is using different identifiers to match your offline conversion with its online one. Conversions from clicks use Google Click Identifier (GCLID) and enhanced conversions for leads. While conversions from calls use imported phone call conversions. Further, SalesForce and HubSpot are the most popular CRM tools on the market with native integrations with Google Ads. You can create rules to automatically send your funnel conversion events back into Google Ads as offline imports. CRMs and other customer database tool types you will need for setting up integration via Zapier.

However, sometimes, importing or syncing your offline conversions results in an error or does not have the intended impact on performance. This happens because of too recent clicks, usually less than six hours old, or older than 90 days, attempting to include perfect conversion values using poorly structured ones, uploading conversions from one account into another, and not having any online conversion events to match with.

Navigating Offline Conversion Implementation

Beyond just feeding information back to Google. Some advice on how paid media teams (especially agencies) deal with friction manifesting during the process.

Getting access to client data. Onboarding a new lead-gen client, ask for assessing their CRM and customer data, which could be HubSpot, SalesForce, or another tool which needs to be connected through Zapier. Then, after looking for call tracking, chatbots, and landing pages, follow two step process- ensuring that all leads are landing in their CRM and sending the qualified lead back to Google Ads.

CRM Integration. It typically includes what works with whatever a client uses. For instance, HubSpot is recommended to clients who didn’t have a CRM before involvement. It has a free plan, scales, and connects to Google Ads natively, and once it is in place, ensure that converted leads are landing in HubSpot or whichever platform they are using. With conversion actions set up in Google Ads, sync those back to the ads platform. If you track phone calls, form submissions, and charts as conversion events, each of those would drop the lead into the CRM with a GCLID.

Value-based Bidding. Once the lead progresses from prospect to marketing-qualified or sales-qualified lead, it is sent as another conversion action back to Google Ads. This is telling Google that the lead just turned into a more valuable asset. With an increasing value population in Google Ads against different milestones, use target return on ad spend (ROAS) bidding for lead-gen.

Working with clients. Clients are hesitating to share access to tools and information, limiting the agency’s potential to deliver results. But as part of the sales process, if they want to focus on quality leads, this is what is needed. Most of them are okay with sharing, but sometimes it is necessary to sign an NDA.

Working with client-side sales teams. During the use of offline conversions, you need to sync with sales teams, whose job is to turn leads into deals.

Offline Conversion Tracking to Increase PPC Revenue

Implementing offline conversion tracking correctly enable to pay dividends after the process is completed and automated. Google Ads campaign management handled by the platform, like real-time bidding and keyword matching, high-quality data is often the difference between average and above average results.

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. Ultimately, offline conversion tracking enhances the long-term profitability of most of the ad campaigns by a noticeable degree.