Offline Conversion Tracking Implementation: Webmaster | Google Ads

Key Takeaways

This video is designed for web developers who are helping to implement the Google Ads offline conversion tracking solution. Offline conversion tracking is a solution that enables your company to measure which leads turn into sales and revenue. So you can better manage your bids and budgets to increase your overall advertising ROI. Now before we get started, please note that you can always find further details and instructions at this URL. So to start, let's take a quick look at the bigger picture so you can better understand where your work fits in. Of course, everything starts with the user as they click on your ad and arrive at your site. After that, they browse your site, they read about your products and your services. And after that, they hopefully fill out a form and they become a lead for your business. Now that information will then get passed into your CRM database. And ultimately, they'll reach some conversion event like when they purchase a product offline. And that's what we have to upload into Google Ads. Now that we've seen this from the user's perspective, let's talk about what's actually happening behind the scenes. When the user's click comes to your website, it has a unique ID called the GCLID that is central to this process. Once they're on your site, you're going to need to capture this GCLID and save it for later usage. Because when they fill out the form, you're going to have to pass that GCLID value along with the lead information so that it ultimately makes it into your CRM database. And later on when that conversion event happens, it's this GCLID that we need to extract to upload into Google Ads. If it's not already obvious, as the web developer, your goal is to enable steps two and three. So let's look at what what really means. When a user clicks on one of your company's ads, Google appends the Google Click ID, also known as the GCLID, to the URL via a parameter called GCLID. Your first goal is to capture the GCLID from this parameter and store it so it can be retrieved in this or another web session. The GCLID is an alphanumeric string which can be up to 120 characters long. Now, to make collecting and storing this value as easy as possible, Google provides the JavaScript for you. This script performs two important tasks. First, it extracts the GCLID from the URL and it stores it so you can access it during future sessions. And then second, if a lead form is present on a given page, the script will pass the GCLID value to the form to ensure that it gets passed to your company's CRM system along with the lead's information such as name and email address. Updating your site using the Google script. If you choose to use the JavaScript that Google provides, which we recommend you do, then here's what you'll have to do. Here's a quick overview. Step one, update your lead forms to include a new GCLID field that will pass the GCLID value along with the lead's other information to your CRM system. Step two, update the JavaScript with these new form fields IDs. Step three, place this updated script on every page of your website. Now, let's deep dive on each of these steps. In order to transmit the GCLID along with the lead's information, you need to add a hidden HTML form field to every lead form on your website. Since the receiving system, typically your CRM system, needs to capture and then store the GCLID. You often need to coordinate this effort with your CRM counterparts. Now, in some cases, they'll actually need to regenerate the form's HTML code to include this new GCLID field. Or otherwise tell you what the field's ID should be. Now, when possible, we strongly recommend that you use the same form field ID on every form page as it makes maintenance easier. However, it's fine if the form field IDs differ from page to page as the Google JavaScript can look for many different IDs. Now that you know the new form field IDs, you then need to add these IDs to the GCLID form fields line in the JavaScript. This tells the script which fields to pass the GCLID value to. And as I mentioned a few seconds ago, this line can accept multiple ID values if you simply include them all within the square braces. Finally, in order to ensure you capture every GCLID, it's important to place this script on every page of your site. This is very important since websites constantly change. So, consider inserting it into a common shared part of every page like the footer code. And of course, this becomes even easier if you use a website tag management solution to do so. No matter how you implement this, ensuring the script will always appear on every page means that you'll never need to remember when and where to add it. Testing your implementation. Now, once you complete the implementation, here's a simple way to test it out. First, open your favorite browser and navigate to a random page on your site. Then, you're going to manually append a test GCLID parameter to the URL. Make sure you then hit enter so the page actually loads with this test parameter. And once the page is loaded, we're going to close the browser. This is so you can test that the GCLID can be retrieved in a subsequent session. Now, let's reopen the browser. Then we're going to go to the homepage and then navigate to a page that contains a lead form. Finally, go ahead and submit a test lead on that page. If your setup is complete, you should see that the test lead information and the GCLID have successfully been recorded in your CRM system. Thank you. We hope you found this video helpful. And again, you can find these details and more at this URL.