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 on your site.
After that, they browse your site to 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 perspective,
let's talk about what's actually happening behind the scenes.
When the users click come to your website it has a unique ID, called the GCLID,
that is central to this process.
Once there on your site, you are gonna need to capture this GCLID
and save it for later usage,
because when they fill out the form,
you are gonna 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,
is 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 2 and 3.
So let’s look at what this 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 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 1.
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 2.
Update the JavaScript with these new form fields' IDs
Step 3.
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 this 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 favourite browser,
and navigate to a random page on your site.
Then you´re gonna 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 gonna close the browser.
This is so you can test that the GCLID can be retrieved in a subsequent session.
Now, let's re-open the browser,
Then we´re gonna 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.
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