You've got your Google Ad campaign off to a great start, or so you think. You're getting clicks and you're even getting leads or 'conversions' via form submissions or calls.

The problem is that you don't know which leads or customers are coming from which keyword. This makes it difficult to gauge the true effectiveness or profitability of each keyword you're advertising under.

This usually leads business owners to try some roundabout methods to tracking the true impact of each keyword in their Google Ad Campaign.

Some will attempt to create a dedicated landing page for the Google Ad Campaign, this way they know every lead that comes in via that landing page came from Google Ads, and they can track the profitability of each keyword that way.

This may sound good in theory, if we ignore the fact that it would be a hassle to have a different landing page for EACH keyword you're advertising under. In practice, I've seen roughly 20-30% of conversions/leads on a Google Ad Campaign bounce from a landing page like this and they end up converting on the main website.

This leads back to our original problem, how to track the effectiveness and profitability of each keyword when you don't know ALL the leads and customers that came in via a certain keyword in your Google Ad campaign.

The solution is to use something Google calls 'offline conversion tracking'. It allows you to sync your sales data in your CRM to your Google Ad Campaign, this way you'll know which keywords lead to the most sales offline, not just the most leads.

It can be a little difficult setting up offline conversion tracking, fortunately there is software you can get that will make it easier to get offline sales conversion data in your Google Ad Campaign. My personal favorite is WhatConverts. It's not a CRM but rather it sits in between your ads and your CRM.

There are some CRMs that can make tracking offline conversions easier like Hubspot and Salesforce. They both have native integrations with Google Ads that you can use to import offline conversion data. I've only used Hubspot in this regard and only for tracking offline conversions from leads that come in via form submissions. While Hubspot does have their call tracking now, it's not quite clear if it's possible to track offline conversions from calls using Hubspot. This is why I still recommend just using WhatConverts for this.