Offline conversion import
offline conversions / importing sales back into Google Ads / GCLID upload / tracking phone sales
An offline conversion import tells the ad platform that a click became a sale somewhere it could not see. You store the click ID with the lead and hand it back when the deal closes. Microsoft states that anything uploaded more than 90 days after the click is not imported.
Microsoft opens with the situation rather than the feature: a customer sees your ad, clicks it, then calls you, and the sale happens offline. The platform saw the click. It has no idea what the click was worth, and it never will unless somebody tells it.
Google describes the handoff plainly. It provides unique IDs, called Google Click IDs, for every click that comes to your website from an ad. You save those IDs alongside whatever lead information you collect. Later, when that person converts in the offline world by signing a contract, you give that click ID back to Google Ads along with a few details about the type of conversion it was and when it happened.
Microsoft works the same way and lists what it needs: the time, the date, the Microsoft Click ID, and the conversion goal name. It also names the two prerequisites that decide whether any of this is possible. Code changes have to be made across your pages so the click ID in the URL can be captured, and click IDs have to be stored with the corresponding prospect information gathered on your site.
Then comes the sentence worth writing down. Microsoft states that if a conversion is uploaded more than 90 days after the last click, it will not be imported. There is no failure to notice. The sale simply never appears in the account, the campaign that produced it looks like it produced nothing, and the money it made is invisible to every decision after that.
In practice
When someone says the phone sales cannot be tracked, the gap is almost always one of two things, and both are fixable. Either the click ID is not being captured and stored with each lead, so there is nothing to hand back, or it is being stored and the uploads are too slow. A sales cycle of two months with a monthly upload is fine. The same cycle with a quarterly upload loses whatever crosses the line late.
Not the same as
- Call tracking
- That tells you a call came from an ad. This tells the platform the call turned into money.
- Modeled conversions
- Those are estimates the platform produces when it cannot observe an event. This is a fact you supply.
Why it matters to you
Automated bidding optimizes toward the conversions it is given. If every real sale closes on the phone and none of them are sent back, the system is being told the goal is form fills, and it will get very good at producing form fills. The campaigns that generate cheap unqualified leads will look like the winners, because on the data the platform has, they are.
What to ask or check
- 01Is the click ID captured from the URL and stored against each lead in the CRM?
- 02How often are closed sales uploaded, and is anything aging past the 90-day limit?
- 03Does the bidding strategy use the offline conversion, or only the form fill?
What people get wrong
That the platform can work out which ads produced real sales on its own. It sees the click and nothing after it, and Microsoft sets a hard cutoff: uploaded more than 90 days after the last click and the conversion is not imported.
Red flags
- Leads stored in a CRM with no field holding the click ID.
- Sales uploaded on a schedule longer than the 90-day window.
- Bidding set to maximize conversions when the only conversion counted is a form fill.
Who owns it
It is shared, which is why it often fails. The site or tag setup captures the click ID, the CRM stores it, and somebody has to upload the closed sales on a schedule that beats the window.
Where you will see it
Wherever the ad click and the money are separated by a phone call, a quote, or a visit.