The Power of Importing Offline Conversions in Google Ads
In the fast-paced world of lead generation, companies must track and optimize their online advertising efforts.
However, most businesses overlook the impact of offline conversions on their overall marketing success.
By harnessing the power of importing offline conversions in Google Ads, companies can gain deeper insights, make data-driven decisions, and maximize their demand generation strategies.
Let’s explore why importing offline conversions is vital for companies engaged in demand generation.
Understanding Offline Conversions
What are offline conversions?
Offline conversions refer to valuable actions taken by customers that occur outside the online realm.
This includes phone calls, in-store purchases, or, more importantly for lead gen are meetings scheduled through your CRM.
While digital marketing typically focuses on online interactions, it’s important to recognize that a significant portion of conversions, and maybe your most important conversions, occur offline.
The Power of Importing Offline Conversions
The Power of Importing Offline Conversions
By importing offline conversions into Google Ads, companies gain a holistic view of their marketing campaigns.
They can measure the full impact of their online advertising efforts, including both online and offline conversions.
This comprehensive tracking allows businesses to accurately assess their return on ad spend (ROAS) and make informed decisions about their demand generation strategies.
Optimized Campaign Performance
Importing offline conversions empowers companies to optimize their demand-generation campaigns effectively.
Businesses can identify the most impactful touchpoints in their customer journey by analyzing the correlation between online ad interactions and offline conversions.
This valuable insight enables them to refine their targeting, messaging, and budget allocation for maximum results.
In addition, Google uses these offline conversions to automatically optimize your campaigns if you’re using an automated bidding strategy.
What’s an automated bidding strategy?
You can set a campaign to target a specific ROAS or get as many conversions as possible with your daily budget.
Ideally, you don’t want it to learn solely based on your contact form submissions or phone calls.
Why?
Because your forms could get hit with spam from your ads, or maybe vendors search your keywords and fill out your form in an attempt to sell to you.
You don’t want Google to go out and find more of those types of conversions, do you?
Instead, you want Google to learn from the “Good Leads”, and that’s where importing offline conversions is so essential.
Enhanced Audience Insights
The integration of offline conversions provides valuable audience insights that go beyond online interactions alone.
Companies can uncover patterns and behaviors of high-value customers who engage both online and offline.
Armed with this information, businesses can refine their audience segmentation and develop personalized marketing strategies to attract and convert similar prospects.
Implementing Offline Conversion Tracking
Businesses must implement proper tracking mechanisms to leverage the benefits of importing offline conversions.
This typically involves integrating CRM systems, call tracking solutions, or other offline conversion measurement tools with Google Ads.
Companies can ensure accurate attribution and seamless data integration for comprehensive reporting by setting up conversion tracking properly.
So how do we do this?
The secret is in the GCLID.
The GCLID is a unique parameter appended to the destination of a URL of a Google Ads Campaign.
It’s assigned specifically to that user’s click.
We can capture the GCLID value on a form or a phone call using call tracking tools such as CallRail.
The GCLID value is then passed to your CRM.
Once your sales team qualifies that lead, we can then import the GCLID value back into Google Ads as a qualified lead.
Then if the lead converts into a client, we can import again using the GCLID as a converted lead and attached a value to the client which could be one time purchase value or a lifetime value.
Now we can see which keywords, ads, or campaigns drive the most valuable business conversions.
Above is an example of one account that has been importing offline conversions.
You can see the campaigns have generated 1,085 clicks for a total spend of $3,055.
Those clicks generated 59 online conversions or form submissions.
Of those the client qualified 17 as “Good Leads”.
Of those qualified leads, 7 became clients.
They then assign a $1,000 lifetime value per client to get a 2.3 ROAS.
Best Practices for Importing Offline Conversions
Clearly define the conversion actions that matter most to your demand generation efforts.
You can have as many online conversion actions as you want.
However, you can only import 2 offline conversion actions, qualified leads and converted leads.
Here you’ll want to have defined a sales process for qualifying leads and the ability to report and share that data with your marketing team.
It’s what we like to call “closed-loop marketing”.
Where sales shares data with marketing.
Regularly Analyze and Optimize
Get in the habit of importing daily, I suggest setting up a direct import via API to either Salesforce or Hubspot so it’s automated.
If you can’t automate import your offline conversions at least weekly.
It’s important to note you have 90 days from the date of the original click before the GCLID expires.
If you convert that lead after 90 days you can no longer import a conversion action.
Continuously analyze the data on offline conversions to identify trends, patterns, and areas of improvement. Regularly optimize your demand generation campaigns based on these insights to drive better results and maximize your return on investment.
Conclusion
In the realm of demand generation, importing offline conversions in Google Ads is a game-changer.
By recognizing the impact of offline interactions, companies can gain a comprehensive understanding of their marketing performance, optimize their campaigns effectively, and uncover valuable audience insights.
Implementing offline conversion tracking and following best practices empowers businesses to make data-driven decisions that drive growth and success in their demand-generation efforts.
Stay ahead of the curve and unlock the full potential of your demand generation strategies by harnessing the power of offline conversions in Google Ads.
