When managing a Google Ads account, it's critical to pair your CRM data with your campaign data. In this guide, JDM provides instructions and best practices for connecting your offline data.
Customer relationship management (CRM) is a tool for managing all your company's relationships and interactions with customers & potential customers.
Connecting your CRM to Google Ads gives you the complete picture and helps you measure success by tying back your digital marketing efforts to your business's bottom line. By connecting the two, you can see which keywords and campaigns drive the most qualified leads revenue and, ultimately, which keywords and campaigns to optimize. If you don't have the two connected, you could be missing a key part of the big picture when it comes to driving leads.
For example, let's say you are tracking conversions on a "free demo" request form, and you count those form submissions as leads, which then go into your business's CRM: When you take a deep dive into your CRM data, you've identified two keywords that drive a majority of your business SQL's and Closed/Won leads. Therefore, you decide to increase bids on both keywords.
If you didn't have your CRM data connected to your Google Ads data, you would have no idea which keywords were driving these leads and would risk spending more on the wrong keywords.
Keep reading for tips and tricks on how to connect your CRM and Google ads data to help you efficiently measure the success of your digital marketing campaigns.
Auto-tagging allows you to see how effectively clicks on your ad lead to valuable customer activity, such as filling out a form, website purchases, newsletter sign-ups and more. It is also required to import conversion data from external sources such as Google Analytics or your CRM.
Unfortunately, auto-tagging is turned off by default, so you will have to enable it. To do this:
On the left hand side navigation go to your Settings → Account settings
Click the Auto-tagging section
Click to select the check box next to "Tag the URL that people click through from my ad"
Click to Save.
Now that you have auto tagging set up, you can level up your tracking by uploading offline conversions using Google Click ID (GCLID).
With GCLID imports, unique identifiers are passed through the post-click URLs and then into a business's CRM once a prospect completes a form. This is ideal for companies that drive larger lead volume from paid search ads and want to use that data for further optimization inside Google.
Below are instructions on how to prepare and import your conversion data:
Utilizing UTM tracking allows there to be an additional source of truth for your data, and can help with quality assurance to make sure no GCLIDs are being missed.
Setting up UTM tracking is the most straightforward way to connect your CRM data to Google data without any heavy lifting. A UTM is an extension added to your URL that lets you track specific details about your campaigns. These details will be added to the end of your URLs, then placed into your CRM.
You will need to ensure there are correlating fields in your CRM that match the UTM's you are tracking. For example, if you are using utm_campaign, make sure there is a designated field where all utm_campaign data will be placed.
We recommend having UTM's set up at the account level to ensure any new campaigns created will automatically have tracking, but you can also set up UTM tracking at the campaign, ad group, and ad level.
It's common to have errors, especially when it's your first time importing conversions. It can be frustrating when you’ve put in the time to try to set up offline conversions and then you are hit with an error message. Below are some common issues to look out for.
Connecting your offline data can be the key to your online marketing success. At Jordan Digital Marketing, accurately measuring results is essential. Connect with us today to boost your company's bottom line!