How does Offline Conversion Tracking work in Digital Marketing?

Not all the businesses are online. In fact, most companies, including most part of online companies, happen offline. 

Let’s take a simple example of the Passenger Car business.

As per the Google-Kantar TNS study, 96% of car buyers in India use search during the purchase journey. However, over 95% of car purchases happen offline in the showrooms after the test drive.

For passenger car sales, if you are running a lead generation campaign in digital media, while lead creation happens online, the final purchase always occurs offline.

In this scenario, the campaign can be optimized for the lead event, where the information is collected online, or the final purchase event, where the information is collected offline. By sharing the offline events and optimizing the campaign for them, we can drive better ROI from the campaigns.

This is one example of where we need to send an offline conversion online. There are many such scenarios. Let’s get to the how part now.

Offline to Online Conversion Matching

To take the offline conversions online, we need two things.

1. Marrying the event that happens online (leads in the above example) to the event that happens offline (converted leads/purchases).

2. Then, this information should be passed back to marketing platforms like Google, Facebook, etc, so that platforms can optimize the campaigns for this event.

Now, let’s leave out the technicalities and take a step back.

If you were in this situation, what exactly would you need to match the leads(tracked online) to the converted leads(tracked offline)?
If you think from the first principle POV, we need one common identifier available online and offline to establish the connection.

Simple.

Till two years ago, that identifier was Click-ID.

• GCLID- Google Click ID

• FBCLID - Facebook Click IDs are the top two types of click IDs.

When a user clicks on an ad and reaches the website, Google/Facebook generates a unique click ID and adds it to the landing page. The website must read and store this ID in the session’s Cookie.

If the same user submits the lead form, the website must pass this click ID along with the lead information to the lead management system(LMS). LMS gets updated when the lead converts offline. This converted lead with its Click ID can be sent back to Google ads or Facebook ads.

This data sharing can be done as a one-time upload or recurring uploads through Sheets, HTTPS, or SFTP connection.

Once this data is uploaded, Google ads/Facebook ads match the Click ID of the converted lead to campaigns and show them on the conversion action. With this, we can start optimizing for converted offline leads.

While this process still holds good for Facebook ads today, things have changed in Google Ads last year.

With Safari's latest ITP(intelligent tracking prevention) release, click IDs are blocked from campaign URLs in Safari, Firefox, and other privacy-focused browsers. It was replaced with a new ID called WBRAID.

So, Google introduced something called Enhanced Conversion Leads(ECL). In ECL, Google has added one crucial step in the regular conversion tracking.

When a user converts into a lead on the website, we usually pass the conversion event to the Google ads engine. We also pass conversion value in most cases.

With the ECL, we will also need to share the lead information to Google. These lead information will be used as the unique identifier of the lead. These values should be either the email ID or the phone number.

Google accepts them as the hashed data and stores it.

Once the lead converts into sales, we must upload the converted lead data to the Google ads system through direct CRM integration or offline upload.

Here, Google will again hash the lead's identifier and match it with the identifier stored during the conversion tracking.

This is a more straightforward method. Yet, why are Google Ads and Meta Ads using click ID earlier?

Because with click ID, you can identify the user uniquely at the click/session level, whereas with enhanced conversion, you can only do it at the lead level.