Problem

The customer has been struggling with a major challenge: how to start tracking conversions with their values which mirror important events for his business? The customer is not interested in the predefined automated conversions in Google Ads which are often useless and only drive your spend up (e.g. “Clicks to call, Local actions – directions, Local actions – Other engagements).

The goal was to:

1. Properly start identifying paid leads in Zoho CRM (You would not believe how many business struggle to understand sources of their leads)
2. Start storing GCLIDs into Zoho
3. Start uploading conversion values when leads moves through different stages in the CRM (e.g. “Contacted”, “Moving Forward”, “Converted to a Contact”…)
4. Start optimizing campaigns toward conversion values and NOT toward pure lead counts

New leads can be generated from multiple assets:

1. Lead form submission on a landing page
2. Lead form extension submissions directly in Google’s SERP
3. Phone call to a number shown on a landing page (tracked via CallRail)
4. Phone call to a number shown as a call extension of an ad

In order to track all relevant conversions, I had to figure out how to track even #4 – again, we are not talking just about capturing +1 lead, but we also want to upload conversion values when the lead moves through stages in the CRM while having no GCLID available because call extension calls generate no clicks (=so no GCLID to be captured).

Solution

A high level description of the solution is simple – make sure to capture all source information of the lead (GCLID or phone number) in the CRM when the leads arrive and then capture all important events happening in the CRM, and finally upload these events as conversions back to Google Ads.

I want to stop by the conversion uploads for calls. To my surprise, it’s relatively easy to upload call conversions despite having no GCLID. You only need to provide:

1. Customer phone number
2. Date and time of the original call when the customer first called you
3. Date and time of the conversion event
4. Conversion value
5. Currency code

And that’s it – the only real challenge is to figure out which calls were made to the phone number allocated to phone extensions in Google Ads. Of course, it needs to be a unique number just for this purpose. If you are using your main phone number everywhere, that you will never know where the calls are coming from. Luckily, this customer has been using over 50 Twilio phone numbers just for tracking purposes where each of the numbers just forwards to his main office number. But knowing which Twilio number was originally called before the forward has a tremendous value in our tracking efforts.

Speaking about Zoho CRM, capturing the important events was also relatively easy. While Zoho’s UI is not that great, it’s very flexible in terms of features and especially on the webhooks front. You can easily capture e.g. lead stage/status changes and push them to a webhook (unlike e.g. in Pipedrive where you have to listen for ALL changes in leads or deals with no possible filters). So for example, whenever leads reach one of customer’s important status, lead ID will be sent to a Make webhook and then Make will retrieve all important info about the lead (the source, GCLID, phone number etc.) and then this info can be used for conversion uploads later in the flow.

Scenarios and Outcomes

To adress all challenges, we only needed four scenarios in Make. We did not have to deal with lead form submissions which were captured along with GCLIDs by a native Zoho plugin. So we only needed a scenario to capture leads coming from lead extensions. The scenario starts with a webhook which you can paste into Google Ads and Google will simply start posting all the leads to your webhook URL. From there, we can upload a conversion with a value defined by us back to Google Ads, also create new lead in Zoho (with stored GCLID) and Asana.

The second scenario is listening for new calls captured by CallRail – so these would be the calls going to a landing page phone number. CallRail will provide GCLID to you automatically so again, we can immediately upload a conversion with a value back to Google Ads.

The third scenario is identifying the calls made to phone extensions in Google Ads. As mentioned, the customer has a pool of over 50 numbers residing in Twilio. We know which number is used in Google Ads phone extensions. So we only needed to start monitoring ALL calls going to Twilio and then filter down to the number used in the extensions. From there, we could immediately upload a CALL conversion back to Google Ads, again with a value defined by us.

Until now, we’ve been dealing only with new incoming leads but we have not solved situations where leads move through different stages in the Zoho CRM. That’s what the last massive scenario is doing – it’s listening for important Zoho events (lead status changes) pushed to a webhook and then depending on the event, it either uploads a click conversion or a call conversion back to Google Ads with different values depending on the current lead status. When the event happens in Zoho, we already know the source of the call (GCLID vs phone extension… remember we stored this when the lead was originally created) so we can upload the appropriate conversion (click vs call).

Conclusion

At this point you might be wondering – is this hassle worth it? The honest answer is that I don’t know yet. At the time of writing this article, we’ve been capturing the conversion events for about 4 weeks and we are about to start optimizing the campaign toward the upload conversion values. You can reach to talk about this if you are interested.

From technical point of view, I enjoyed the project – Zoho CRM is very flexible and developer friendly as well as Twilio. Uploading call conversion back to Google Ads was also a breeze. The hardest part of the project was to map all possible lead entry points and to figure out how to identify the paid leads across various systems.

Are you facing similar challenges?
HIRE ME

Or maybe you want to try yourself?
GO TO MAKE