How To Track Offline Conversions From Your Google Ads

For any business that chooses to advertise on the digital domain, Google Ads is one of the most important platform for outreach, awareness and more critically for generating leads. Google ads support businesses with excellent tracking and monitoring systems. However, when it comes to offline sales, many businesses fail to connect the dots between Google ads and offline conversions.

Let’s find out 3 effective ways to track offline conversions from your Google Ads.

1. Conversion Import:

As long as you can get and store the client’s GCLID (Google Click Identifier) to associate with each conversion action, Google can support you to import offline conversion data.

- Set Up The Converstion:

a) Create a ‘new conversion’ and select ‘Import’ from the list of conversion types
b) Now you need to select the ‘source’. Many main stream CRMs already are integrated with Google Ads, but even otherwise, for any spreadsheets or third-party apps, you can import easily from “other data sources or CRMs” .
c) On the redirected screen, you will need to name the conversion and also choose the category. (i.e, qualified, closed sales etc.). You may also choose to assign revenues to these fields.
d) It’s time to save the fields and start building the templates for importing your data
– start by selecting the desired file format: Excel, CSV, or Google Sheets
– select the timezone, according to your region

- Prepare Your Import Template:

Your import template must include:

– Google Click ID
– Conversion Name
– Conversion Time
– If you’re capturing the revenue, then also put the currency codes

- Importing the Data:

To import the data, visit the ‘conversions’ section of your account and select ‘Uploads’ that is in the left sidebar. Click on ‘+’ and start uploading your desired file format. It’s important that at this stage you click on ‘Preview’ and check the file probably. If everything is in order, click ‘Apply’ and sync all your data. Please also note that it might take a few hours to show on the interface.

2. Phone Calls: For a lot of businesses, phone calls are of prime importance. If your business falls under this category, then you can implement phone tracking by which you can easily track these business leads.

- Call Extenstions:
  Ensure that call extensions within Google Ads is activated whereby phone numbers can show up while serving advertisements. You may opt for ‘call-only’ ads to people who are accessing these ads from their mobile phones.Google also lets you to choose calls only with a minimum duration cut-off which helps you scrap unnecessary calls that did not fetch any business interactions.
- Website Call Reporting:
  It’s essential that you monitor calls that happens from your website, when someone clicks on an ad.You can choose Google’s forwarding number setup which enables a user to see a unique, trackable number instead of your current regular number.

3. In-store Visits:

Yes, you can actually track your in-store visits that are getting converted from your advertisements. However, please note that when it comes to off-line tracking of in-store visits, Google’s plan of action is quite different and at times even blurry.

Firstly, this conversion tracking depends on a few things including, location, number of store visits, how many physical locations your business has, how many impressions and clicks your business gets etc. Your business also must conform to the privacy policies set by Goole. You will also need to ensure that your store’s locations are claimed and verified to qualify for this tracking system. Once all the location extensions are set up successfully, you will start getting the data under “All conversions” and “View-through conversions” columns. You may need to note that if number of store visits are not too high (minumum 100 and above) these data sets might not be very accurate.

Your advertising efforts are not optimal if you’re not using the off-line tracking methods effectively. Yes, the initial efforts to set-up the offline conversion tracking might be additional, be rest assured, the return on time invested will always be positive.