Tracking Offline Conversions from Phone Calls in Google Ads

You have a Google Ad Campaigns set up and it's generating call conversions; calls that lasted over 60 seconds, or whatever length of time you set. The problem is, you don't know which calls are leading to actual offline sales conversions. You're only able to see calls that lasted over X seconds long.

You can't even see a name or phone number for the call conversion in Google Ads. You only know that it happened. It would be great if you could see which keyword a lead or customer came in on so you can better optimize your campaign to increase quality leads and sales.

You know Google Ads has offline conversion tracking which is designed for this purpose, but you're not sure how the hell it works. You've read about something called the 'GCLID' but it's all greek to you.

Do you even need the GCLID for offline conversions coming from a phone call?

The answer to that question is no. Google Ads tracks offline conversions differently depending on if the lead came in via phone call or form submission.

For form submissions, you need to collect the GCLID but not with phone calls.

For phone calls, the unique identifier is just the user's phone # they called in on. That's how Google connects the dots later when you upload your CRM conversion data into Google.

So first, you need to start collecting the following data for each phone call lead:

Caller's Phone Number
Call Start Time

Then if they become a customer, you need the following:

Conversion Name
Conversion Time
Conversion Value
Conversion Currency

You can keep track of this data in a CRM, Google Sheet or Airtable. You'd then need to import this data into Google Ads regularly. Here's a template Google offers so you can see what they're looking for.

The Zapier Zap only deals with offline conversions from leads that submitted a form, not calls.

If this all seems very daunting it's because it kind of is. There is an easier way fortunately. Lately I've just been using software called WhatConverts to handle offline conversion tracking for calls and forms.