Online advertising has made it incredibly easy to create leads, analyze website actions and track the success of campaigns. The problem is, however, not all conversions take place online.
Someone clicks an ad on Google, fills out a form, talks to a sales representative and buys the product some days or even weeks down the line. If this conversion happens through the CRM system, over the phone or in person, conventional conversion tracking through the website would miss it entirely.
And this is where offline conversions come into play.
In addition, one needs to be aware of privacy considerations and consent management. Using Consent Mode v2, advertisers are able to communicate users’ consent preferences to the measurement and advertising systems of Google, thus making their measurement abilities change in case of no consent from the users.
With these two concepts in mind, you’ll be able to create a more comprehensive and privacy-focused measurement strategy.
What Are Offline Conversions?
An offline conversion is a conversion which occurs outside the website but can nevertheless be tied up to some previous marketing touchpoint. For instance, let us consider a case where somebody searches for “business loan”, clicks on a Google ad and fills out a lead form. The lead goes to the company’s CRM. The sales manager calls the person, and in two weeks the client signs the agreement. The website has captured the lead. The CRM has captured the deal.
If the advertiser uses just the form fill-out metric, Google Ads will start optimizing for leads who won’t ever buy anything from the advertiser.
Google Ads Offline conversion tracking allows advertisers to feed the advertising platform with the data on what happened after the conversion.
Examples of off-line conversions are:
- Lead qualification
- Phone sales
- Contract signing
- Store visits
- Loan approval
- Insurance
- Booking
- Activation
B2B opportunity reaching a certain sales stage brings much better clarity between advertising costs and business results.
Why Google Ads Offline Conversion Tracking Is Important
Not all leads represent conversions that are valuable for the business.
Imagine a B2B firm using Google Ads. In this case, its campaign brings about 500 leads, out of which 40 are qualified opportunities and 10 are paying customers.
When the ad serving platform is optimized based on the first form fill alone, it will favour campaigns that have produced thousands of cheap leads.
However, this does not mean that these campaigns bring any money.
Offline conversion data can be used as an additional
source of information. The measuring path goes like this:
Ad click → Lead → Qualified lead → Sales opportunity → Customer
Instead of asking, “Which campaign brought the most leads?”, one should be asking:
“Which campaigns brought those customers who brought us money?”
What Is Consent Mode v2?
Consent Mode is Google’s approach for configuring measurement and ads according to user consent settings. Consent Mode v2 introduced additional consent signals for Google to process, including ad user data and ad personalization, to combine with the already existing consent signals of ad storage and analytics storage.
In layman’s terms, the system will know which type of advertising and analytics processing has been approved by the user.
For instance:
The user comes to the website → The consent banner appears → The user agrees or disagrees with certain purposes → The consent signals are sent to Google tags
If there is consent from the user, then the tags are able to work according to that consent. But if there is no consent, then the Google tags configure themselves according to the consent signals.
This is crucial because measurement in accordance with privacy needs to take into account that not all visitors can be measured in the same manner.
How does Consent Mode Facilitate Privacy-Friendly Measurement?
Conventional measurement usually relies on cookies and identifiable signals to a large extent.
However, in case a user does not give consent for some reason, such signals may be unavailable.
Consent Mode is meant to assist advertisers in keeping their measurement capabilities in consideration of the consent provided by the user.
The Consent Mode of Google can use cookie-less pings in case a user does not consent to particular storage categories. Such signals can be used in case of modelled measurement in case there is enough data to model conversion at Google.
Thus, it is important to distinguish:
Consent Mode does not ignore the consent.
It allows Google’s measurement system to react to the consent status provided by the website.
Working Together for Offline Conversions and Consent Mode
Offline conversions and Consent Mode resolve two distinct elements of the measurement puzzle. Offline conversions resolve the question:
“What comes next after the online engagement?”
Consent Mode resolves the question: “Given the consent of the user, how should measurements and advertising tags operate?”
For instance:
- A user clicks the Google Search ad.
- A user lands on the website.
- The website captures the appropriate consent signal.
- The user fills out a lead form.
- The lead lands in your CRM.
Ultimately, the customer completes a purchase.
And then you report the eligible offline conversion data back to Google Ads.
The final outcome would be the measurement approach that links the marketing efforts to downstream business results, while not forgetting about privacy.
Offline Conversions and Consent Mode| How to Implement?
Usually, the successful implementation process implies cooperation between marketing, analytics, development, and sales departments.
- Define Important Conversion Events
First of all, you need to identify important business goals.
Not everything can be considered a conversion event. Not every CRM status can be treated as one.
You need to decide if you need to optimize for leads, opportunities, closed deals, revenue or any other milestones.
- Implement Consent Management
You need to have a correctly configured consent management system and provide consent data to Google tags.
The implementation will need to make the difference between different consent categories and not just implement consent as a yes/no parameter.
- Collect Eligible Identifiers
Depending on implementation and requirements of the platform, the following identifiers may help match an advertising event and a subsequent conversion.
Google Ads provides several methods for importing offline conversions, including enhanced conversions for leads that can use first-party data for better tracking when implemented according to the Google requirements.
- Connect Your CRM
You need to have your CRM track the transition of leads to customers.
The marketing department needs to see which leads came through the marketing team needs visibility into which leads originated from advertising and what happened to them afterwards.
- Know the Offline Conversion Results
Once the conversion takes place, this data can be imported from Google Ads with the help of import methods. This will allow agencies to gain better results.
- Verify the data
It is important to verify the process before you use Offline conversions. These are the factors you need to verify,
- The exact timeframe of the conversion
- The value of the conversion
- Duplicate conversions
- Status of CRM
- Consent signal
- Imported conversion data
Even the smallest quality issue will have a greater impact.
Mistakes to Avoid
One of the worst mistakes you may make is to consider that Consent Mode can replace a consent management platform. Consent Mode provides consent signals to Google; however, it does not replace your legal responsibility for obtaining consent or check whether the experience of your website is compliant with the requirements.
Another mistake you may make is to send every CRM event back to Google. You should only use proper and configured conversion actions for optimization purposes.
Additionally, it is also important not to optimize campaigns for low-value conversions only because they are easy to achieve.
Finally, pay attention to the quality of your data. Incomplete CRM records, wrong timestamps, and duplicate conversion events will lead to incorrect offline measurement.
Creating a More Effective Measurement Approach
The future of measurement does not lie in merely gathering more data. Rather, it lies in gathering the right signals in a responsible way.
From the perspective of the business, the goal is simple:
Measure the customer journey, honour user preferences and optimize outcomes that truly matter.
Coming to an end, with offline conversions and Consent Mode v2 put together in a proper way, the marketer will be able to shift away from incomplete and click-driven reporting and onto a more effective measurement approach.
