Offline conversion tracking is a dream for B2B advertisers. It lets you take a whole chunk of data your automated bidding strategies were previously missing out on and optimize toward it. But if you’ve set up offline conversion tracking, and you’re not quite sure what to do next, here are some tips on how to optimize for the best lead quality.
1. Assign Value to Your Conversion Actions
Think about the lifetime value of your customer and the steps along your customer journey. You can assign value to each step along the customer journey to make sure your campaigns are optimized to the right conversion actions.
First, you’ll determine the lifetime value of a customer. In determining the lifetime value of a customer, you want to consider the number of users who converted from PPC clicks, average revenue per purchase, average purchases per year, and then number of years they’ll be a customer. Multiply all of these number together, plus your profit margin, and subtract your Google Ads spend and voila! You have the customer lifetime value.
From there, you’ll work backwards to determine what value each step of the customer journey has.
Let’s imagine you sell software to enterprise level businesses. Your average lifetime value for a customer is a $10,000. You know on average, before someone becomes a customer they download a case study, then sign up for a webinar, and if they attend a webinar, your sales team marks them as an SQL and takes it from there.
That’s three steps before they become a customer. You know from experience that about 10% of people who become SQL turn into customers. Your $10,000 customer lifetime value multiplied by the 10% conversion rate from SQL to customer means the value of a meeting attendee is roughly $2,000. From there, you can continue working backward to determine a value for each step.
2. Create Custom Columns for Each Stage in Your Sales Cycle
Continuing from our previous example, you now have your 3 steps in the sales cycle (case-study, webinar, and SQL), and you know the rough value of each. Create custom columns in the Google Ads interface to better organize this information. Access custom columns by choosing ‘Modify Columns’ and search for ‘Custom Columns’.
Creating custom columns is the easiest way to define metrics around your imported offline conversions. You can also lump together different conversion actions. If you’re tracking multiple case study offers as conversions, you might lump those together under one umbrella in a custom column. You can assign value to each conversion action, making it easier to track metrics like ROI or revenue. You can also create custom cost/conversion metrics for different conversion actions.
3. Optimizing Your Campaigns Towards a Conversion Action
Which conversion action your campaign optimizes for really depends on your campaign objectives. Using the same sales cycle steps as we did above, you know that your sales cycle is long, so it may take a while for leads to become sales-qualified. In this case, you might want to set up your campaigns focused on awareness and reach to optimize toward the first step in your sales cycle, a case study download. From there, you can use remarketing campaigns to drive users to more down-funnel conversion actions.
On the other hand, if you know your sales cycle is pretty short, your strategy might change. If it’s totally reasonable to expect someone to move through your sales cycle in one website visit, you’d optimize toward your most valuable conversion. From there, you can remarket to users who didn’t complete the process, much in the way ecomm businesses retarget shopping cart abandoners.
4. Smart Bidding Strategies and How to Use Them
Choosing a smart bidding strategy for campaigns using offline conversion tracking really depends on what your goals are. By assigning conversion values to conversion actions, you can choose the Maximize Conversion Value bid strategy to shoot for a specific ROAS.
Best practice says you should see 30 conversions/month per campaign. If you struggle with a slow or low conversion volume, try switching to maximize conversions for the first month to accrue enough conversions. From there, you can choose your preferred conversion action.
