A Deep Dive Into Offline Conversion Tracking – All Things PPC Podcast Ep10

And we find that a lot more for a lot of our clients, a lot more people will call through the website. And those are also the better quality leads.

Okay. Hello. I am here with Siobhan who is one of our senior client managers here at PPC Geeks. How are you doing? I’m good. Thank you. How are you? I’m good. Thank you. So today, uh, Sean’s, Siobhan’s suggestion as well, this, which I’m pleased about was we want to do a deep dive into offline conversion tracking and why it’s so important to so many businesses that we work with.

And I think as well, something that many businesses don’t even think about or knows possible for lead generation. So that’s what we’re planning to, to dive in today. And you’ve, you’ve dealt with this for quite a few clients, haven’t you, Siobhan, over the years? Ah, yes, I have. And also, um, it’s evolved now in Google ads in terms of the general move away from cookies, uh, and into enhanced conversions, which means actually offline imported conversions are a lot easier now for some clients than they were before.

Yeah. So let, well, let, let’s start at the start, the best place. Um, can you just briefly give us an overview of At a high level without going into the technical details, what situations offline conversion tracking is needed for and what it actually means and why we push it. Yeah, so I’ll give you an example from a current client of ours.

So, this client sells their products via their website, in which case the website tracks credit card payments. That information comes back into Google Ads when there’s a conversion and it’s tracked as a normal conversion. So both us, the client, our account management team can see exactly how much spend is converting.

and to revenue for the client. Now, in addition to those website sales, the client also has a certain element of lead generation, which means that some people contact them, for example, via telephone or via a website form, the client talks to those people offline, and then those people make a purchase offline, not through the website.

Now that person might have come to the client through a Google ad, Click, but there’s no record of the amount of money that they spent. So it means that to a certain extent, when that information is not fed back into Google, both ourselves and the client and the Google ads algorithms don’t have an idea of exactly the value of that particular lead.

So. If we can somehow get that data back into Google Ads of those offline sales, then it means that both the algorithms and our account management team have clearer visibility on what kind of user profile is most likely to convert and therefore, uh, chase more of that kind of user profile for more conversions and therefore more revenue.

Yeah, so it’s about getting as complete a picture, isn’t it, for a business of where The, the ROI that they get from their PPC campaigns. And we do have quite lots of businesses that come in this category of what I call hybrid e commerce lead gen, where they will take stuff online, but they will take stuff online.

Offline as well. And especially in higher ticket items as well, you can have longer sales cycles. And I think it’s also important to get that visibility because often these offline sales can be much higher value. So for example, if they’re buying. Someone might be coming to buy one product. This, I think one of the clients we do this for is in the technology industry.

So maybe you’re buying one product, an iPad or something. But then you, if, if you’re, um, say a university and you want to buy 20, you probably want to call up, say, can I have a pro forma invoice and all that kind of stuff. And obviously that’s a much higher value. And if we missed that, In the overall assessment of the value of the campaign.

We can’t demonstrate that ROI and we wouldn’t know where it’s worth bidding up or positioning ourselves, would we? So, yeah, it’s, it’s definitely useful for that. If you just purely gem, um, then, then. There’s there’s ways of just tracking that and if you’re just pure e commerce, but it’s always interesting when it goes in the middle, isn’t it?

So what are some of the biggest challenges that we typically face when trying to put this in place? I would say just just for you answer that What about 90 percent or so of clients we take on have some kind of tracking issue or missing tracking? So what kind of issues do we face when implementing this kind of conversion tracking?

Well, in the past, the biggest issue has really been that, um, for clients who use a CRM system, there can be some element of integration with Google Ads, but it depends on the CRM. Not all are compatible. Um, so in which case then there’s, um, a sort of element of having to use extra additional or even third party technology.

To extract the required data from the CRM system of those leads or sales into something, for example, like a Google Sheet and then upload it back into Google Ads. So it’s not exactly what one would call a seamless process. There’s additional tech involved. Sometimes that’s extra resource and cost, and often sometimes what can happen is the data that comes back doesn’t really match the Google Ads.

So one of the. Uh, more traditional areas where we found errors occur is where the Google ads can’t match the actual lead, which is recorded via a Google click ID. Um, and the algorithms can’t match that click ID to the campaign or the click ID is missing. So we’ve had quite a few issues just in trying to get that match between whatever is being uploaded, um, and aligning it with the campaign.

Now something that’s happened more recently which has helped to resolve this problem is the move away from the Google Click ID to what’s called Enhanced Conversions. Now this way what happens is that Google remembers or has some record of the lead’s email address, or their phone number, which I should say is encrypted in some way.

It’s not a direct match, um, but still that’s the identifier. So because now enhanced conversions allows leads to be tracked through email address or phone number as opposed to Google, Google Click ID, it means that now some of our clients can manually fill in a Google sheet with this is the email address or this is the phone number.

This was the amount of the conversion value that came from the eventual sale. And then we can upload, import that back into Google ads. And there’s no need then for that Google click ID to be extracted somewhere along the line, which in the past, that’s where the problem was. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. It’s definitely got easier and there’s new tools available.

I guess one of the, one of the big challenges we have is quite a lot of companies don’t even have a CRM, do they? They don’t even have a way they, well, they have a CRM, but it’s not a software product or a bespoke system. It’s often just a spreadsheet or heaven forbid a piece of paper with whether they’ve got leads it.

So it is having, That mechanism to tie things back. And once you get to a certain size and you’re investing a certain amount in ads, it’s worth then investing in these tools to get a better picture because the more data you have, the more you can optimize on that. So if, if. Traditionally, we would do it through click Zapier, for example.

Zapier is a great tool to integrate lots of things that people aren’t aware of. What other things can we do around offline conversion tracking, which might not necessarily get the data into Google, which is the holy grail, that’s what we want, but can still help with that feedback loop. Things like call tracking.

or just the conversations you have with clients. What kind of stuff do we do around that? Yeah, well, certainly call tracking is one where we can set up, uh, for example, a third party a system that there’s a couple of ways to do call tracking. One is Google’s own, what’s called dynamic number forwarding, where Google will place, um, a dynamic number, uh, for users who click onto the website through an ad and therefore track if that person makes a call or not.

Part of the problem with that, though, is it’s limited in terms of there’s no feedback in terms of any conversion value that may come from an eventual sale, unless, of course, there’s an entire system set up. The other alternative, which I know you’ve done for some of our clients, is to set up a third party system.

call tracking system, which can then track the calls and some of those call tracking systems also allow for the integration also of the sale. Does this result in a quotation? What’s the value of the quotation? Does it result in a sale? What’s the value of the sale? And then that conversion value can be fed back into Google ads.

So call tracking is certainly one way to track calls. Another option is a, for example, for clients who don’t have that sort of tech set up, it’s just to talk to them and find out are your leads good quality or not, and we get some really good feedback from clients where they’ll say, yeah, we’ve got some really good leads at the moment.

So we know that we’re on track. Other times clients will say, well, we’re getting a lot of leads, but they’re not really our target market. So we’ll know, well, we’re not quite hitting the mark there. And we’ll make some changes either to the way we’re, we’re, we’re targeting or the kind of audiences or the user profiles that we’re going after, even things down to keywords and ad copy.

So even just a feedback that we get from the client, we all set up regular meetings with our clients to make sure we get that feedback to know, even if we don’t have any, data driven results from them, just to hear from them is lead quality good, um, or is it poor? And we can make adjustments based on that.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think it’s important to know, isn’t it? Although we, we strive for perfection, that having some system in place rather than no system in place helps. So what you, if, if it wasn’t possible currently with the client to integrate what we call closed loop revenue attribution, where you can go from click to all the way back through to sale offline.

If it’s not possible to do that, having those conversations and applying some standard kind of metrics, it’s a good way to look at the ROI. So for example, if a client knows that out of 10 inquiries, they would make a sale. For four of them and there’s an average order value for those sales, which is why it’s so important to know Lifetime value we can then at least Extrapolate the value of those campaigns depending on the volume as well If they’re high volume, you would hope they have crms in place and systems, but on lower volume stuff We can do other things.

For example, I don’t I don’t like the excuse Of, oh, well, if you haven’t got closed loop aversion, there’s nothing we can do. We can do things like we can download reports from Google ads of conversions by type, time of day and hours of day. It’s never totally accurate, but it’s a good indicator of here’s the call.

You know, you got three calls on this day in the morning and you could say, where did those calls go? Because one of the problems we have with poorer tracking is that clients know they’re getting inquiries, but they don’t know from where. Yeah. And if they, if they are good enough to say to a lead, where have you found us?

Then people just say, Google, we don’t know if that’s organic. We don’t know advert. We don’t know how many adverts they’ve clicked on. So you have to bring these things together, don’t you? If we just talk a bit about call tracking, um, one of the mistakes I see is that some, some people, when we take over accounts, are only tracking calls from adverts.

There’s a few issues with doing that. Uh, could you, could you speak a bit about those? Well, yeah, I mean, number one, it does miss a massive portion of those people who click through from an ad and then make a call from the website. And now also there’s things around me. We’ve had some clients where we find, for example, the quality of lead that comes through a click from an ad isn’t quite as good as the quality of lead.

Um, sorry, a call that comes through from an ad isn’t quite as good lead quality as a call that comes through from someone who’s clicked onto the website from the ad, spent some time browsing the website and then made the call from the website. That seems to be much more of a kind of considered in which case it’s more likely to result in a sale.

Um, so definitely calls from ads. It’s worth tracking, but it doesn’t give the full picture. And we find that a lot more for a lot of our clients, a lot more people will call through the website. And those are also the better quality leads. So it’s very important. And also just to pick up on the point that you made around not knowing exactly where the leads are coming from, whether that be a call or an email, um, um, One of the things that we can also do to help our clients to know the difference there, or to know where we’re attributing those leads from, is to have a spreadsheet that the client will set up.

And what we can do is, depending on the date and time that that lead came through, We can then trace it back through looking at GE4, for example, and also Google Ads to see can we trace that back to a Google Ads campaign. And sometimes we can, we can say for sure this lead came from PPC, this is the campaign it came from, and this is the keyword that generated it.

So, Whilst it’s not that closed loop that you were talking about, it still gives us enough data so that we can know, did that lead come from PPC? Yes or no? Was it a good quality lead? And recently what we did for one of our clients was an analysis. That client didn’t know they were getting a lot of leads and a proportion of them were poorer quality leads.

A smaller proportion were quality leads, but they didn’t know where they were coming from. Was it PPC? Was it organic? There was no, no way of knowing. So we did a full analysis by tracing back from the date and time of those leads, which ones were organic and which ones were PPC. And what we found that was 90 percent of the good leads came from PPC traffic, whereas most of the poorer leads came from the organic website.

So with that. point we knew, okay, it’s worthwhile continuing to invest in PPC because PPC is actually driving the majority of the good leads. And most of these poor leads are coming from the organic site. Yeah. And that’s often around the intent behind the kind of searches we’re targeting on PPC and depending on the industry.

I mean, there’s some, some industries where there’s a lot more urgency, like dental, for example, if you, you know, if you break a tooth, you need an emergency dentist, there’s a lot more. You get high conversion rates, there’s a lot more intent there than people shopping around, say for teeth whitening or veneers or whatever.

And so that’s another important thing why to go to the next layer of not just knowing is, did they get a lead or not, but what was it for? Another thing is that, um, when you, so back to the call tracking on ads as well, we, we’ve, we’ve often found, haven’t we, that when you put the call tracking on ads, that’s the kind of easy tick box for someone managing an account in house.

But in reality, you often get a lot of people who are existing customers calling up through that method because they’re just Googling your name. clicking on the first thing that comes up. So that’s why we prefer when it comes to call tracking to have a third party solution. You can then spot check the calls.

So we have all the warning messages about data protection and stuff on there, but we can then spot check the calls. And I remember doing this quite a few years ago with, with a client that’s been with us for about eight years now, which is a long time in our business. And there’s still a client. And they work in the, um, their commercial heating in industry.

And they have, I’ve always been quite ahead of the game on systems. So they’ve got all these fancy tablets that all their engineers go out with and stuff. And when we put in call tracking, when we first started working with, we realized I played some of the calls back to the, to one of the directors and the people who were answering the phone were almost too good at their job because someone would call up and say, I’m calling from.

wherever this school, something relevant. And then they would start before even saying, how can I help quote or whatever? They’d say, are you an existing customer to which people would say no. And then they would start taking, filling out all these credit application form details up front. So they would say, okay, I just need to fill out all your details.

And the person on the other end is going, I just need a quote at the moment. And it’s, that’s another advantage of having this form. Full visibility of what’s going on because there’s so many tentacles in these campaigns. If you don’t see everything going on, you can miss things that can have impacts on conversion rates and stuff.

And that’s why it all comes into this holistic model. And with the call tracking as well, we use it for BFC, but you can set it up to track all the organic and social as well. So you get a complete picture with the cross platform and all that kind of thing. So, um, Yeah, it’s quite, it’s weirdly a complex subject, but it gets more interesting the more you think about how useful this data can be.

And what I would say is just that because it sounds technical doesn’t mean you should use any excuse to not do it. You have to do these hard things to get better quality data for your campaigns. Yeah. And I feel I should also say that the Google ads dynamic number forwarding can be a bit buggy. We’ve experienced clients who’ve had issues with the wrong number showing things like that.

So, I mean, it doesn’t happen all the time, but a small percentage of the time. So again, a third party system, not only does it give a lot more data, but it’s a lot more reliable. Could you just explain why that happens for the audience? Eh, so, well, I’m not sure exactly why or how it happens, eh, but, but what’s happened, or what we found is that, so, generally, when Google Ads dynamic number forwarding is involved, when someone clicks on an ad, and they view a website, the dynamic number forwarding will replace the phone number that’s displayed on the website with Google Ads number.

I guess they have a database of numbers that they can use. So that’s displayed. So then the user phones that number. So the phone number initially goes through to Google, who can mark it as a lead conversion as such. And then that, Caller ID is forwarded to the actual business number. What we found occasionally happens is that the number that is displayed sends the user not to the accurate business number, but to a different business.

Now that could be because the Google ads has a limited number of, uh, dynamic numbers that can use these and it doesn’t refresh its database. Um, and then algorithms get a bit of a tizzy. However, it happens. We have found that on occasion that has happened. So, uh, rather than it being a case of, um, sending the lead directly to the client, it sent the lead somewhere else entirely.

Yeah. Well answered. Yeah. So it is, is quite notorious and reliable because they have a pool of numbers and they don’t give you the number. So they just cycle through them and they have quite a short half life on how long the number is allocated to your campaign. The idea is that Let’s say you and me and two of the people listening to the podcast all are searching for the same red pen at the same time and they type that into Google and they all go to the same website.

If this call tracking system surfed up the same number, it wouldn’t know who. Which of those user sessions generated a conversion? So they cycle through numbers. The problem is Google doesn’t let you keep those numbers for long, which is why we generally recommend third party systems. You then own the num they’re virtual numbers, but your business owns them.

You can use the same area code as your business. And then also if people call back, say, two, three weeks later on the same number that they’ve saved, you’re still going to capture that. There’s not the risk that it’s been recycled. I will say that’s a big concern for business owners, but in reality, and we’ve looked at the data, about 95 percent of cases, people, you know, they don’t, They don’t call back two years later on the same number.

There’s only the odd one, but there’s definitely better systems out there. And you get a lot more data as well. So the ones we, we work with a wide variety. We don’t, we don’t recommend them. We’re big believers that clients should own their third party software. Um, but we call rails very easy to implement.

There’s a response tap, which is quite a complex system. There’s what converts and a local one to, to the Northwest UK is called Ruler Analytics and Ruler Analytics does more of the closed loop revenue attribution built into it. It can integrate into CRMs, et cetera. So there’s lots of systems out there, but it depends on your needs because let’s not forget this is a cost to a business because you have to, because when you’re using a call tracking system, you have to pay per minute extra to receive calls.

So it is a bit alien to people, but if you care about your data, it is worth the investment. Well yeah, plus the investment pays off when we know exactly where the spend should go in Google ads because we’ve got that data to back up. Okay, certain campaigns are driving offline conversions at a certain value, so therefore we can put more budget into that particular campaign.

Interestingly, on some of our clients that have those systems set up, We find that some campaigns drive more offline conversions than others, and therefore if we don’t have visibility of the number of leads and the value of those leads that are coming through, we don’t know to increase budgets in those areas.

And we have had in the past clients who haven’t implemented these systems and we’ve had campaigns that looks like they’re not performing as well. So we’ve paused them to funnel budget elsewhere. And then the client said, ah, they’ve got a drop off of offline leads. So we’ve known then, okay, we can go back and funnel budget in here.

But if there’s an actual system set up where that offline data is fed back into us, we get to see immediately, okay, Okay. This campaign, it’s not driving online conversions, but it’s driving high revenue and offline conversions. And as you mentioned earlier, it tends to be the high ticket items because people who want to price a enterprise products, uh, they don’t do it through the website.

They’ll want to talk to someone and call them and then be invoiced separately. Um, so it’s really, the investment pays off at multiple times in terms of, um, knowing exactly where that ad spend goes and what the ROI is and how we can optimize Yeah, and with those high ticket purchases as well, often the time lag from an initial lead to an actual conversion can be, in some cases, many months, and there is, there is a limit on how far it’s worth going back.

And that’s meant sometimes, much as we’d like everyone to have this offline conversion tracking, perhaps if it goes over 30 to 60 days, it becomes less useful and we have to use other methods like the average order value method. And apply those metrics to sometimes we will apply a conversion value to a lead to help the algorithms, but we’ll always discuss that with the client and make sure that they understand what you just said reminded me of, um, a client we work with who are under NDA, but they, let’s just say they do something like we buy.

Any car, but for motorbikes or some kind of bikes. Now that’s very interesting case of offline conversion tracking and how that works. And I’ll tell you why it’s because most people who are leads are not in the market to sell their bike at the moment, which is their primary business driver. They want to buy as many bikes in.

So if you think most people, they buy. How much is my motorbike worth? They put the reg number in and they have a look and that they’re a lead, but they’re not, they’re just wondering how much their motorbikes were. So from our point of view on the front end, just the people driving leads, driving traffic, we’re able to drive leads very cheap for people just looking for that.

But when you go to the offline conversion tracking, you see that the terms that people put in, which actually convert on the backend are totally different. Sell my motorbike quickly or stuff like that the lead on the front end might be more expensive But on the back end the the total back end cost per acquisition can be lower And it’s only by having that data and having a crn that can track that that can lead to You know, get that to the place.

We always talk here, don’t we, about don’t just chase vanity metrics, like clicks, et cetera, but sometimes a vanity metric is cheap leads if you don’t know what happens once, once they’ve been sent over. Yeah, exactly. And I actually had an interesting conversation with a client earlier this morning around some changes we made on one of their campaigns, where actually it reduced the volume that was coming in.

But actually, um, conversions went up and with a better CPA. And again, that’s based around that fact of, well, we can drive a lot of leads, but if those leads don’t convert, um, then it’s, it’s not really an efficient use of spend. Yeah. I mean, the amount of people, potential clients I speak to who say, Oh, my traffic’s not high enough.

I’m like, I can get you loads of traffic cheap, but. You want the right traffic, and that’s, that’s why we are so adamant and one of our core, core pillars of what we always talk about is, is accurate conversion tracking, whether it’s online, offline or, or however, and how that all fits into the holistic marketing piece, not just PPC, because something that has changed recently, I don’t know how much, Uh, you’ve discussed this with clients is what we call assisted conversions, seeing when people find out about you from one place and then convert in another area and having all that set up.

Is there anything to consider when it comes to attribution models, not just for offline conversion tracking, but general? Conversion tracking because of these, what’s called a multi channel approach. Yeah, it’s good to have a sort of what’s called data driven attribution so that there’s multiple touch points that are recorded as a contribution.

Sometimes, for example, clients will come to us and they’ve got a sort of last click model set up, but then that doesn’t tell us, um, path then that the user made or any other touch points along the journey. So again, in terms of measuring accurate conversions, it’s good to have some kind of data driven attribution where we can see there’s been multiple touch points and maybe a certain ad contributed 25 percent towards a conversion as opposed to either being, yes, it was a conversion or no, it wasn’t.

And that all adds up. And again, that data is really useful to have. Yeah, I mean, unfortunately, Google’s moving the default to data driven, but once you start putting in multiple channels, it does make a difference. And one of the classic cases is when someone does an initial search, they might find you through a product based search.

Again, to my, my timeless red pen example, someone types in red pen, they’re shopping around, they want a fancy red pen for whatever reason. That might be how they first search. And then, they might go away, they might get a call, they might come back later and they say, Oh, what was the name of that call? Oh, it was, uh, Ryman Stationery or something.

And then they’ll type that in, and then convert. If you haven’t got that visibility across the whole piece, you don’t know how you initially got that customer. And again, that’s something that people miss so often. Oh, of course. And it also reminds me of, I mean, we’ve had cases where again, looking at the sort of different touch points that users make before they convert.

And we’ve had, we’ve seen a trend for Some of our clients whereby someone will search for a particular product. They’ll land on the client website. They’ll then search for that product or some voucher system somewhere and then make the purchase through one of those voucher websites. But actually, The click came in originally through one of our ads, even though the last click model would have shown it as being attributed to the voucher site as a referral, it wasn’t.

Originally that that first search came through an ad, and so the user only made that purchase because they came to that client via an ad first, even though the end purchase was made through a voucher site. Driving awareness, for sure. And the hack there, of course, is to have your own voucher page in a way that if someone types in your brand name with voucher or review or something, you come up first.

Yeah, really good point. I think we covered quite a lot of technical detail there, Siobhan, on offline conversion tracking, which I strangely found quite exciting, despite it seeming, it seems quite a lot, let’s be honest, quite a lot of topics in PPC are quite dry, but I just love the Getting true business data for our clients on what works.

And I think this is an area that a lot of people just let themselves down on in house teams. They don’t think it’s possible or they don’t, they don’t know how to do it. And it is really a strong thing to optimize campaigns. Yeah, definitely. Okay. So I, brief summaries then I would say really consider all your touch points, where you’re actually having conversations with customers and where they’re going to convert, how you can get that data back in and then look at third party tools to implement that or, or the right partners.

But thanks for your time today Siobhan. I know you’ve got client work to get back to probably about offline conversion tracking, but thanks for your insights. That was great. And I’ll see you on another episode too. Super. Thank you, Chris.