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In the online advertising world, conversions can happen both online and offline depending on the format of your business. With users using multiple platforms and mediums to research and purchase, it can be difficult to attribute where the purchase or lead was triggered from.
If your conversion funnel involves an interaction such as a phone call, face-to-face tour, or a visit to your brick-and-mortar store, offline conversion tracking is essential in order to record accurate attribution. In this blog, we are going to cover what offline conversion tracking is and the benefits it could have for your business.
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While tracking user interaction with ads is very important, it is often just as important to track the actions that happen after a user clicks on your paid advertisement. For example, a user may click on your advertisement, followed by actions that result in them purchasing over the phone or in person at your store. Using offline conversion tracking allows these actions to be recorded, measuring what happens both online and offline.
Within Google Ads, there are different ways in which you can import data in order to track offline conversions:
Google Ads Conversion Import
The first way to import offline conversions is directly through Google Ads’ own conversion import system. This allows you to import data from both conversions that start with a click and conversions that start with a phone call from your advertisement. This is a very popular method as you are able to import from a wide variety of other systems that are used to track conversion information.
Salesforce Offline Conversion Tracking
Another way of importing offline conversion data is through the popular CRM platform Salesforce. This system allows you to see automatically whether a sale was led via an initial ad click.
Other popular platforms for uploading offline conversion data include Zapier and HubSpot’s Google Ads optimisation tool.
More Insight into Your Conversions
Often when you can only see the data obtained from the ad interaction itself, there is a limited view of the whole customer journey used to receive a conversion. By introducing offline conversion tracking, you gain more visibility for your conversions and how they were made.
Understand Your Customer’s Behaviour
Gaining a higher level of insight into your customer’s conversion journey using offline conversion tracking helps you understand more about their habits and behaviour when engaging with your business. By identifying patterns in the behaviour of potential customers it can help you navigate your marketing strategy and what they engage with most.
Identify Your Cost-Effective Conversions
Using offline conversion tracking can help you identify your most popular campaigns with more accurate data and therefore help you identify the conversions that are the most cost-effective. This allows you to up-weight the budget for campaigns that are performing highly, and reduce the budget for campaigns that are underperforming in comparison.
