Using Google Ad Offline Conversion Tracking to Maximize Return On Ad Spend
You have a Google Ad Campaign setup to generate form submissions (i.e. leads) and calls for a local business. There's just one problem. You're not able to accurately track return on ad spend for the campaign.
The main reason for this is because the sale for the business happens offline. It's easy when tracking sales conversions with an e-commerce shop because the sale happens on the website. This isn't the case for the countless local businesses that handle sales offline, however.
Businesses like Senior Living, Therapists, Physical Therapists, Psychiatrists, Dentists, etc. The list goes on and on.
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You have a Google Ad Campaign setup to generate form submissions (i.e. leads) and calls for a local business. There's just one problem. You're not able to accurately track return on ad spend for the campaign.
The main reason for this is because the sale for the business happens offline. It's easy when tracking sales conversions with an e-commerce shop because the sale happens on the website. This isn't the case for the countless local businesses that handle sales offline, however.
Businesses like Senior Living, Therapists, Physical Therapists, Psychiatrists, Dentists, etc. The list goes on and on.
In an effort to measure your Google Ad campaign's return on ad spend (ROAS), you may try to send traffic to a dedicated landing page. This way you know anybody who submits that form, came from the Google Ad campaign. You can then later see if they became a customer.
This way of doing it doesn't scale, especially if you're generating several leads a day. The sales data also isn't synced with your Google Ad campaign on the keyword and ad level. It's also not accurate because it assumes that the customer journey is linear. It assumes they're going to convert on the landing page you want them to convert on.
This just isn't how it works a lot of the time.
In many cases, visitors will bounce from the landing page and go to the main website to research the business. Sometimes they may come back to the main website days later from a Google Search, or social media post.
This is especially so with businesses that have a longer sales cycle.
So what's the solution? You need to set up something Google calls calls 'offline conversion tracking'. It allows you to track offline sales conversions from calls and form submissions that come from your Google Ad campaign. This then allows you to optimize your campaign more effectively, on a cost per sale basis, not simply a cost per lead basis.
Imagine finally knowing exactly how much revenue each keyword is generating, how much revenue each search ad is generating, how much revenue each zip code, device, time of day, day of week is generating.
You could finally know that you're ad campaign is profitable first of all, and more importantly, you can use this data to maximize your return on ad spend.
There are a few requirements if you want offline conversion tracking to work:
Your business needs to be keeping track of leads and which leads became a sale either by using a sales CRM like Salesforce or keeping track in a Google Spreadsheet.
Your web forms need to have the ability to have hidden fields and add custom HTML element ID's. If you don't know what this means, you'll probably need our help adding custom forms to your website for this type of tracking.
Your site needs to be able to add custom javascript code to any page of your website to capture the GCLID and insert it into a hidden form field. If you need help writing the javascript required to set up offline conversion tracking, feel free to drop me a line.
Last but not least, you'll need to export and import your CRM sales data into Google Ads.
If this all sounds rather daunting, and you wish there was an easier way to set up offline conversion data then you're in luck. These days I just use WhatConverts to track offline conversions and import that data back into Google Ads. Setup is very simple and you can be tracking offline conversions in no time.