AdWords Debuts Offline Conversion Tracking For Full Sales Cycle Optimization

Running lead generation campaigns on Google AdWords? Measuring success and optimizing campaigns for actual sealed-deal conversions, not just lead in-take, just got a whole lot easier.

On the heels of rolling out cross-account conversion tracking and search funnels for MCC users, today, Google announced a new feature that allows advertisers to import offline conversions derived from PPC leads back into AdWords.

Once a user clicks on your ad, AdWords assigns a unique click ID (GCLID). That GLID gets saved along with the lead information you capture. Now when that user completes an offline conversion event, you can upload the GLID to AdWords along with the type and date of conversion as well as any order value.

Your offline and online conversions are then all included in AdWords to help you optimize your campaigns based on data that encompasses the full sales funnel. You can set up as many offline conversion types as you need — qualified leads, closed sales, etc. — and track and optimize for each step along your sales cycle.

There are also ways to use this new feature to track certain types of online conversions separately from the overall conversion capture, such as orders only from new customers. And if you’re not able to track online conversions at all with Google conversion code, this could be a solution.

Offline conversion tracking does not work for click-to-call at this time because in order for the GCLID to be assigned, a user has to visit the site. Also note that this new feature is independent of Google’s Universal Analytics which aims to capture conversion paths across traffic sources by visitor.

Several marketing software providers including Marketo, Mongoose Metrics, SugarCRM already have guidelines posted on their sites to set up offline conversion tracking. Google published it’s own guidelines for uploading conversion data from Salesforce to AdWords.

Here’s Google’s quick overview video: