Capturing gclid and Tracking Offline Conversions with Gravity Forms
I’ve set up Google Ads offline conversion tracking several times over the years. The first step is always modifying the lead form so that it captures the gclid and inputs it into a hidden form field so when the lead submits the form, the gclid is passed along with their name, email address, etc. If you’re using a CRM and and your form is mapped to custom fields in your CRM then it’ll push the gclid to your CRM too.
I’ve mostly set this up using Webflow’s web forms and a few others and it usually goes off without a hitch. Just like I explain in this blog post.
The problem is there are a lot of form solutions especially in the Wordpress world and they all function a little differently. One of the most popular form plugins for Wordpress is Gravity Forms. If you’re reading this then you’ve probably heard of it.
Sign up for free access to this post
Free members get access to complete blog posts like this one, plus exclusive Google Ads strategies and case studies.
I’ve set up Google Ads offline conversion tracking several times over the years. The first step is always modifying the lead form so that it captures the gclid and inputs it into a hidden form field so when the lead submits the form, the gclid is passed along with their name, email address, etc. If you’re using a CRM and and your form is mapped to custom fields in your CRM then it’ll push the gclid to your CRM too.
I’ve mostly set this up using Webflow’s web forms and a few others and it usually goes off without a hitch. Just like I explain in this blog post.
The problem is there are a lot of form solutions especially in the Wordpress world and they all function a little differently. One of the most popular form plugins for Wordpress is Gravity Forms. If you’re reading this then you’ve probably heard of it.
Gravity Forms has given me nothing but headaches when it comes to collecting the gclid. First off, it’s important that your hidden form field has the same ID that’s used in this javascript code provided by Google. In most cases, you can set the form ID to be whatever you want but with Gravity Forms you can’t do this. You have to create the hidden form field and then find it in the page source after it’s been published to identify the hidden input fields html ID.
Easy enough right? Sure but even after updating the javascript code to target the html ID Gravity Forms created for the hidden input field, the gclid still wasn’t being inputted into the hidden input field and honestly I have no clue why. Every other time I’ve set this up, it has worked like a charm.
How I Got It Working
Recently, I’ve been using WhatConverts (affiliate link) for tracking offline conversions and it makes tracking offline conversions from Gravity Forms easy as can be. Once you track your form using WhatConverts, it’ll just automatically capture the gclid and once you mark a lead as a sale (by adding a sales value) or qualified lead in WhatConverts it pushes that to Google Ads as an offline conversion.
It also allows you to easily set up enhanced conversions for leads which is great because gclid is sometimes stripped from the query string parameter in some browsers so this will allow you to still track offline conversions from users that are logged into their Google account.
I have confirmed it works with Gravity Forms too since I have a client using Gravity Forms I just set this up for.