Google AdWords can already track the connection between your customer’s click on an ad and a sale on your website. But a new feature called AdWords Conversion Import can help track clicks on an AdWords link right on through to a sale in the offline world.
AdWords Conversion Import Explained
Imagine a series of Google AdWords links leading to a landing page on your site where prospects can leave contact information requesting more information on your product or service.
By adding code provided through Google AdWords Conversion Import to your website, Google lets you collect “click identifiers” designating a click on a specific ad and the day and time of that click.
Those identifiers can then be matched with the contact information of a specific prospect left on your website.
You can place the contact information and the Google code into your customer relationship management software.
If the contact information leads to a sale, a qualified lead or whatever other desired result you wish to track, you can place the imported click identifier code back into Google AdWords.
The feature will allow Google to provide detailed reporting on these offline sales and other activities as a result.
Other Uses
Google says the AdWords Conversion Import could be used to track other more indirect online sales too.
For example, you could use it to report conversions 30 days after a sale to give customers time to make returns. You could record only first time buyers on your site or only second time buyers.
This video gives another view of the new Google AdWords Conversion Import feature:
Image: Google
Aira Bongco
Interesting. This allows you to put all your sales data in one big spreadsheet. This extends your tracking from the performance of your online ads. Now, you can also track some offline sales.
By adding code provided through Google AdWords Conversion Import to your website, Google lets you collect “click identifiers” on a specific ad and the day and time of that click. This is good for tracking sales.
Unless 3rd party tools make this SUPER EASY, this will be usable only be medium-large to large businesses who usually already have fancy tools to do this or do not care enough and just push for volume.
One example how this had been done for years: advertisers would place a unique destination url on each keyword (or ad in display network), this “cookied” the visitor and when she converted to a lead that lead is tagged in the database with Campaign|Ad Group|Keywords|Match Type then they would do this offline analysis and say “leads from X keywords are work $Y and leads from A keywords are worth $B.
This is unlikely to be useful for 85%-95% of the advertisers out there… but I think its a great feature non-the-less.