What is Offline Conversion Tracking?

For any business that has a sales process outside of their digital marketing campaigns, offline conversion tracking can help bridge the gap between your Google Ads campaign and sales that happen in the ‘real world’. 

If you are running Google Ads, you already know it is vital to track conversions accurately to maximise optimisations and attribute sales. However, not all sales that started with your Google Ads occur online. For example, someone could click on your ad and decide to visit your store in person or decide to call your number rather than submit a form. 

In many of these cases, these sales are not counted within your conversion data or attribution statistics, leaving you with an incomplete picture of how well your campaigns are performing and if your marketing efforts have contributed to a positive return on investment (ROI).

Offline conversion tracking helps complete this picture, allowing you to monitor your customer’s journey down the funnel by tracking and identifying sales as well as other actions that occur outside of your website.

Here at Embryo, we understand the importance of offline conversion tracking and it forms an important part of our digital marketing strategy. To learn more about that strategy feel free to get in touch with our team after you’ve read this blog by phone at 0161 327 2635 or email [email protected].

The Importance Of Offline Conversion Tracking

Offline conversion tracking can simply increase the efficacy of your overall marketing strategy.

When offline conversion tracking is properly implemented, you will be able to determine what areas of your PPC are driving sales. It will allow you to continuously optimise your advertising campaigns and note vital touchpoints in your customer’s journey back to your Google Ad platforms and adjust your marketing strategy to drive the best revenue.

For example, if your business has multiple touchpoints from lead submission, consultation and sale. These touchpoints can be noted as conversion goals and provide insight into optimising your Google Ad campaigns. Your Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) may differ from campaign to campaign, allowing you to focus on driving revenue as opposed to general ‘sales’. 

Would This Work for Your Business?

Determining if offline conversion tracking can help improve your PPC or other online marketing efforts for your business can be confusing. But don’t worry, if any of the below apply to you and your business, then importing offline sales can help: 

• When you want to track conversions that happen offline such as in your physical store, over the phone or in a sales process with multiple touchpoints
• When you want to attribute conversions to specific touchpoints in the customer journey
• When your business frequently closes sales offline
• When you want to optimise your campaign to waste less money on keywords that aren’t working, or times of the day or week that result in higher revenue
• When you want to understand the complete picture of your customer’s journey
• When your business has a short conversion window from lead to sale

The Challenges Of Tracking Conversions Offline

Offline conversion tracking can be a difficult process to set up. With tracking restrictions and third-party cookies being blocked, it can be hard to track conversions accurately from different sources. There are many challenges with setting up offline conversion tracking:

Getting Access To The Right Data

Not many businesses or organisations have the resources or infrastructure to track online and offline data sources in one CRM or POS system.

Additional Privacy Concerns

There may be further additional privacy concerns that must be addressed when collecting data from your customers. Many businesses choose to work with a third party that specialises in providing accurate measurement of offline conversions which can be an additional cost.

The Technical Implementation

Manually uploading using a CSV file is the easiest way, however, it does require a large amount of time to collect the data and organise them according to network requirements. This can become complex quickly. Automating the integration of offline data can help solve this issue but it could have a high initial cost.

Conversion Window Times

Offline conversion tracking works best for businesses that have shorter conversion windows from lead to sale. Products that take a longer consideration time or have longer conversion windows, it can take a long time for the revenue to be fed back into your Google Ads account. This makes it difficult to optimise your campaign week on week as the gap between the initial click and the sale can take a long time for the revenue data to be imported back into your campaigns.

Luckily, digital marketing agencies like Embryo can help identify these challenges and implement solutions into your marketing strategy, supporting your business or organisation along the way.

How To Implement Google Ads Offline Conversion Tracking

Implementing offline conversion tracking can be simple. It begins by capturing click data from your paid channels and then linking to an outside source, most commonly your CRM. Once linked and imported back into your PPC account, you will be able to see what clicks lead to sales and further optimise your campaigns. 

Google Ads allows you to import offline conversion data as long as you can grab and store the original user’s unique ID to associate with any conversion actions the user has completed. For PPC, Google provides a unique ID called GCLID (Google Click Identifier) which monitors clicks from your ad onto your website. 

To set up offline conversion tracking with GCLID all you need to add a snippet of code to your website. The code will capture the GCLID from the website URL and pass it through to your conversion tracking system. This unique ID gathers information about the original user, such as location, name, ad clicked and purchase made. 

This data, when linked to your CRM platform, can match up the corresponding ad click in your Google Ads account and the offline conversion. Once this has been linked, you can track your qualified leads and follow your customer through the funnel. 

To have offline conversions accounted for in your account consistently without the need for reoccurring manual file uploads, you will need to set up an automated offline conversion process. 

Want To Know More About Offline Conversion Tracking?

By understanding what offline conversion tracking is and what benefits it can provide, businesses can make more informed decisions regarding their digital marketing campaigns and solve some of the ambiguity that can surround it. 

If you are interested in implementing offline conversion tracking for your business but are unsure where to start, Embryo can help. We know that all levels of tracking are important, from online and offline to your campaigns and ultimately your revenue. Do you want to work with multi-award-winning PPC experts? Get in touch via email at [email protected] or call us on 0161 327 2635.