Do you use Google Ads to generate new leads for your business? Then there is a good chance that you can tell me directly how many leads you have brought in with your campaigns. But can you also tell me how many of these leads are of good quality? And how many of these leads eventually became customers? Were there also low-quality leads and do they perhaps come from certain campaigns or keywords?
Many companies struggle to answer these last few questions. And that in itself is not surprising. This requires a good Offline Conversion Tracking (OCT) strategy and that is not easy. Eighteen months ago we already wrote a blog about this in which we explained the use of the Google Click ID. However, it has become a lot easier to set up OCT in recent times. Namely with the help of Enhanced Conversions. In this blog we take a closer look at how you can get started with this.
What is Enhanced Conversions again?
Enhanced Conversions (EC) arose at a time when first-party cookies have become increasingly important. It’s a feature that helps measure conversions more accurately by using first-party data you collect yourself, such as email addresses and phone numbers. This allows advertisers to bypass any rejected cookies. In our earlier blog about EC we go into this in more detail.
How can we use Enhanced Conversions for Offline Conversion Tracking?
By storing first-party data hashed, advertisers now have a new option to shoot Offline Conversions back to Google Ads. We explain how to start the OCT process using Enhanced Conversions in the step-by-step plan below.
1. Define your conversion actions
Before you start tinkering with your Google Ads account, it’s important to think about the new conversion actions you want to measure. What are the most important phases in the sales process that you want to measure? An example is measuring Marketing Qualified Leads after they have made a contact request on the page. 2 Options offered by Google itself are those of ‘Qualified Lead’ and ‘Converted Lead’. We use ‘Qualified Lead’ for every lead that is of good quality and ‘Converted Lead’ we use for every lead that eventually becomes a customer.
2. Make sure your settings are correct for OCT
Now that you’ve thought about the offline conversion actions you want to set up, let’s fire up the Google Ads account. Via Tools and Settings > Conversions > Settings we go to ‘Enhanced conversions for lead’. Here we select the method by which we measure the Enhanced Conversions. In our case, that is via Google Tag Manager .
3. Set up the offline conversion action
We will now create the offline conversion action in your Google Ads account. In your account, navigate to Tools and Settings > Conversions > +New Conversion Action > Import . Here you choose ‘Other data sources or CRMs. For OCT, we are going to import the offline conversions from a Google Spreadsheet.
Select a category for the conversion action. You should see here that you can choose between a qualified lead or a converted lead. In this example, we’ll continue with a converted lead. Open the heading ‘Optimization options for conversion action’ and choose the option here for now: Secondary action. Only later when it appears that this has been set up correctly and enough data is coming in, we recommend switching to primary action.
Enter a clear conversion name, which is also understood by your colleagues and which makes clear what the conversion relates to, in this case: Converted Lead. Here are a few more settings you can adjust:
- Value: Enter the value that a Converted Lead brings to you. If each customer brings a different value, take an average value. You can send the different values for different customers later via the OCT spreadsheet.
- Number: For leads, we use a maximum of one conversion per click.
- Click-through conversion period: We recommend a period of 90 days.
- Attribution model: We recommend using the data-driven attribution model.
- Import Offline Conversions: Here we use ‘Uploads’.
4. Prepare conversion import: Populate Google Spreadsheet
Once the conversion has been set up in Google Ads, we need to create the file to upload the conversions. As mentioned earlier, we use a Google Spreadsheet for this .
Please note , in order to use and edit this Offline Conversion Tracking spreadsheet, you will need to make a copy and save the file.
You must fill this spreadsheet with all the necessary information. Under email you will of course enter all email addresses that have been entered from your form. For conversion name we use in this example: Converted Lead. We must also provide the time when the conversion took place, in the format: MM/dd/yyyy HH:mm:ss. In addition, it is possible to send values per campaign with the corresponding currency (EUR in our case).
5. Import offline conversions
The preparatory work is over. Let’s now upload the spreadsheet in Google Ads and import the offline conversions. For this we go back to our Google Ads account. Via Tools and Settings > Conversions > Uploads, we can upload our spreadsheet.
Via the blue plus we can choose Google Spreadsheets as source. Here we can link an existing Google Sheets. Here we choose our newly created spreadsheet. You should receive a yellow notification stating that you must give someone access to the spreadsheet. Give this email address access and click on the blue ‘apply’ button.
6. View your results
Good news! Your offline conversions have been imported to Google Ads. It could be that some errors are displayed. For example, a conversion cannot be older than 90 days. You can view the most common errors here .
Did you know that you can also automate the imports of your offline conversions? This process is too extensive to describe in this blog, but we would love to help you with it! You can contact us here.
Conclusion OCT
Offline Conversion Tracking in Google Ads has become a lot easier for us over time. Since the advent of Enhanced Conversions, we can easily shoot leads back to Google Ads. This has made it a lot easier to gain insight into how many MQLs, SQLs and customers your SEA campaigns have delivered.
Gaining these insights into your Google Ads account is really only half the job. How will you use these insights in the optimization of your campaigns? Are you still driving your campaigns on target CPA? Or is it perhaps becoming interesting to focus on the conversion values of your leads? Do not hesitate to contact us, we are happy to think along with you!
Article originally posted by Traffic Builders as “Offline Conversion Tracking aan de hand van Enhanced Conversions“
