If you are running paid lead generation campaigns in Google Ads (or Facebook Ads or Microsoft Advertising or LinkedIn Ads – make you choice here), you likely see that was majority of leads are just bad on arrival. In the campaigns I’ve seen in 9 years, the number of bad leads does not go below 60%, 95% share of bad leads is not an exception either.
The issue is that in the traditional conversion tracking setup, you are likely sending ALL leads as conversions via your pixels back to the marketing platforms. More advanced marketers are also using call tracking solutions (such as CallRail) which will similarly send all calls (or calls above certain duration) as conversions back to Google Ads. By doing so, you are basically telling Google to “Yes bro, give me more of these crappy leads!”. What’s the thing Google likes the most? Your budget! So what’s Google going to do? Their algorithms will of course go and either spend your budget and will start hitting your target CPA while generating lots of bad leads because Google simply does not know which leads are good and which are bad…unless you do something about this.
How to get out of this vicious loop?
Instead of sending ALL your leads as conversions to Google Ads, you will need to:
- Explore the concept of offline conversions and of the underestimated GCLID parameter in your URL.
- Have a “human in the loop”.
- Utilize some Google Ads API magic via no-code platform Make.
As marketer, you have several options how to cope with the problem:
- Send only “good leads” back to Google Ads as conversions via offline conversion uploads (=NO PIXELS!).
- Send all leads to back to Google Ads but assign values based on lead quality. E.g. you can assign 1 USD to all new leads, then you can add additional 10 USD when the lead is qualified and then another 100 USD when the deal is signed. So at the end, bad lead would be 1 conversion worth of 1 USD. “Signed deal” would be 3 conversions worth of 1+10+100 = 111 USD in total. And the final step in Google Ads would be either to use “maximize conversion value” or “target ROAS” bid strategy.
Sounds logical, right? The next minor question you probably have at this point is “but how to do this technically?”.
Technical Steps to Upload Offline Conversions to Google Ads
In a nutshell, your process should look something like this:
- Your Google Ads account has “Auto-tagging” enabled in account settings.
- A visitor hits your website. The “GCLID” parameter (=Google Click ID) is automatically added to the landing page URL by Google Ads thanks to having #1 enabled.
- The user fills out your form.
- The form is sent to your CRM – say – to Salesforce. You send the GCLID parameter value from the URL to a custom field in Salesforce along with standard contact details. If the user called your business instead of filling out the form, you’d need to have e.g. CallRail installed on your site to capture the GCLID for the particular call and phone number based on which you can trace back the GCLID.
- A real human starts processing the lead – the lead might be killed right away or it may continue through your sales process passing through various statuses and stages over a period of several days.
- For important status changes of the lead in Salesforce, you’d assign different values and send them as conversion back to Google Ads.
- For sending to Google Ads, you will need to pass the GCLID parameter value (which you now have stored in Salesforce). In theory you could also pass “Enhanced Conversions” to Google Ads where you’d identify the leads by the phone number or email but this solution will not be as accurate as traditional uploads via GCLIDs.
Simple, right? Do I have a real life example of this process? Yes, I do. To solve the problem, I’m using Make. Here is the situation:
- My client collects forms on his site.
- My client can also be called from the landing page (he has CallRail installed).
- Since CallRail is pretty smart, not only it captures calls with landing page URL (=with GCLIDs) but it also captures form submits with landing page URLs (=with GCLIDs).
- Whenever a new lead appears, CallRail is notifying Make via webhooks – think of this as getting a notification about new lead in real time with all the lead details.
- Make then goes and creates a new lead in Salesforce. Of course, it’s passing the GCLID parameter from the landing page URL provided by CallRail into a custom field in Salesforce alongside of the information filled out in the client’s form.
- Salespeople keep working on the leads and chang their statuses – there are just 4 statuses available (untouched, pending, closed – converted, closed – not converted).
- With Make, I pull all edited leads every 6 hours and assign different values to different lead statuses.
- I assign 5 USD to untouched.
- 50 USD to pending (this means that the lead is NOT bad).
- 100 USD to closed – converted.
- 0 USD to closed – not converted.
- I push these conversions (except “closed – not converted”) with values back to Google Ads via API – again with Make.
- And this process simply repeats indefinitely.
- In Google Ads, I run target ROAS bidding.
Do you want to replicate this for your business yourself?
GO TO MAKE
Or looking for someone to build your integrations?
HIRE ME
Sample Make Scenarios
I am running 3 scenarios in total:
- Scenario to create new leads in Salesforce from new calls.
- Scenario to create new leads in Salesforce from new forms.
- Scenario monitoring lead status changes and pushing then as conversions with different values to Google Ads.
And this is how the config of the Google Ads Conversions module looks:
And that’s it. Just 3 Make scenario doing all the heavy lifting. No coding was really need on my end – that’s all addressed by Make. I am just pulling “the dots” together. (Of course, you could still code a similar solution from scratch with your IT team but good luck with that). Now I have my leads as conversions in Google Ads with assigned conversion values and I can use smarter bid strategies than just Target CPA.
I am not going to provide the actual scenario blueprints because they would not work for you – your needs and CRM set up are likely going to be different than mine so the scenarios would need some tailoring. Consider this article more as a hint or a conceptual idea to solve the “bad leads” problem. Make is supporting many CRMs (Pipedrive, HubSpot, Zoho CRM, you name it…) and each CRM is likely going to be using slightly different field names, triggers and polling patterns.
Facebook Ads, LinkedIn Ads, Microsoft Advertising
While this article mainly mentions Google Ads, solving the problem for other marketing platforms is similar (and simpler in many cases):
- Facebooks Ads – you can upload conversions via Facebook Conversions API. No click IDs needed – you can provide just personal details such as name, phone, email. Supported on Make.
- LinkedIn Ads – similar as Facebook. You can upload conversions by email for example. Supported on Make.
- Microsoft Advertising – you will need to start collecting MSCLKID (=Microsoft Click ID). Not supported on Make.
Sounds Too Good to Be True – What is the Catch?
Well, there are a few. You’ve noticed I’ve mentioned the “GCLID” quite a few times in this article. How are GCLIDs generated? They are appended to your landing page URLs. What happens when you are using ad formats without landing pages? No GCLIDs for you. In other words, you are out of luck when you use any of these formats:
- Call extensions
- Call-only ads
- Lead form extensions
- Local campaigns landing visitors to your Google My Business listing
- …any other format not sending users to your site
This can be partially overcome by uploading “Enhanced Conversions for Leads” (also supported on Make) but I don’t have enough experience to write about this topic yet. As mentioned, you can send the conversion to Google Ads and have them matched by email or phone number but it’s questionable what match rates you’ll get (50% at best?). There are also certain prerequisites which need to be completed in your Google Tag Manager.
The second problem is that if your conversion window is longer than 90 days then these conversion uploads will not help you. No matter how you push your conversions to Google Ads (pixels or uploads), the max time frame is always 90 days since the click. The only option you have here is to find a softer conversion event which happens within the 90 days.
Conclusion
So yes, the conversion uploads are not a perfect solution but still… with slowly dying cookies, the uploads will sooner or later become a new normal. The sooner you adopt the process, the better your campaign performance will be. In reality, even if you do all these the things mentioned above, it may not help your campaign at all. The assumption for this to work is that your campaigns are generating many leads and there is a decent number of “good leads” in the pool so you can tell Google what’s bad and what’s good.
Solving the technical part of the problem is no longer difficult thanks to platforms like Make. You don’t have be a coder to solve the problem anymore. You as marketer can solve this on your own. So what are you waiting for?
Do you want to replicate this for your business yourself?
GO TO MAKE
Or looking for someone to build your integrations?
HIRE ME
PS: You can also go one step further and upload leads from your CRM into audiences in the mentioned marketing platforms (again with Make). 🙂