Google AdWords™ For Dummies®, 3rd Edition

Tracking Offline Conversions

Sometimes conversions occur offline, not on the website itself. When your desired action is a phone call or a walk-in visit to your location, measuring the ROI of your marketing is more challenging than a straight e-commerce sale or completion of an opt-in form. The good news is that because this type of measurement is more challenging, you're likely to have a greater advantage over your competitors who don't take this step. As Thomas Monson said, “When performance is measured, performance improves.” (Or was it Jimi Hendrix?)

If one of the goals of your website is to get the phone to ring, you want to know which keywords and ads attracted the visitors who end up calling you and eventually buying. After all, big ticket sales like consulting contracts, real estate, and fractional jets don't get made via credit card on a web form; they require a personal touch that generally starts with a phone call.

AdWords conversion tracking gets triggered by the visitor landing on a page where you placed the conversion code snippet. Phone calls, as valuable as they are, don't get counted. But there are a couple of ways to solve this problem.

Deploying the fudge factor

A client of ours sells a service over the phone. The phone call can be initiated in one of two ways:

• The visitor sees the phone number on the landing page and places the call.
• The visitor completes a contact form and gets an outbound call.

The second scenario generates an AdWords conversion, while the ...