If you use Salesforce's Sales Cloud to track leads or opportunities or both, you can import your offline conversions from Salesforce's Sales Cloud into Google Ads. This will help you better measure how your online Google Ads investments generate offline value.
In this article, we’ll review the benefits of this feature and the basics of how the process works. When you’re ready, you can follow the instructions to begin importing conversions from Salesforce.
Benefits
- Connect Google Ads with Salesforce’s Sales Cloud to check which Google Ads keywords, ads, and campaigns are doing the best job at driving qualified leads and new sales tracked in Salesforce.
- Google Ads Conversion Import for Salesforce automatically counts Google Ads conversions for any events that you’re tracking in Salesforce. This lets you understand how Google Ads impacts your sales funnel and adjust your account for better results.
- During set up, Google offers suggestions to help automatically map Google Ads fields to related Salesforce fields.
- Use the transformation function to hash input data from user provided data fields, like phone number and email. Learn more about How Google uses enhanced conversion data.
Example
You’ve created ads to send prospective customers to a contact form on your website. When people fill out the form, they are entered as new leads in Salesforce, and you use Salesforce to track every stage in the sales process.
You’ve already set up conversion tracking to see when prospective customers who click your ads submit the contact form. You’ve learned that two of your keywords are especially good at driving these leads. But you know that not all leads are equal: are both keywords resulting in sales?
You link your Salesforce and Google Ads accounts, and you decide to track 2 Salesforce events as conversions: when a lead transitions to an opportunity and when the opportunity results in a sale.
After you start importing these conversions, you learn that while the 2 keywords are both good at driving prospect form submissions on your website, one keyword is much better than the other at driving leads that eventually result in opportunities and sales. You decide to increase your bids for the more successful keyword, and experiment with adding new keywords that are similar to the keyword that was most successful.
How it works
After you’ve set up Google Ads Conversion Import for Salesforce, there are 2 ways your conversions can be imported: enhanced conversions for leads or GCLID-based.
How conversions are imported for enhanced conversions for leads
When someone clicks on your ad, visits your website, and submits their information in a lead form on your website, your website captures the user-provided information, like phone number and email address, into your Salesforce CRM. If you opted into enhanced conversions for leads in the “Settings” section of your Google Ads account, the Google tags on your website will send hashed lead information to Google Ads.
Google Ads will regularly check your linked Salesforce account to find any newly-recorded, important events that resulted from your ads (for example, converted leads). Google Ads will automatically import the mapped fields from your defined Salesforce CRM objects and use hashed lead information to match the event to the ad click that originally drove the lead.
To help make sure your Google Ads conversion data reflects the offline conversions tracked in your Salesforce Sales Cloud account, Google Ads will regularly retrieve and store some information about the events you’re tracking in your CRM (for example, lead statuses and opportunity stages). Learn more about How Google Ads tracks website conversions.
Google Ads will also regularly retrieve the following fields from your Sales Cloud account to identify which custom events need to be recorded as conversions in Google Ads. Google Ads will only pull this data for the objects you’ve specified.
- Status field from Lead object
- Stage fields from Opportunity object
- Any picklist field from Leads or Opportunities objects used to determine when to count conversions (for example Lead: Status, Opportunities: Stage)
Note: If you’re using the legacy integration with Salesforce for enhanced conversions for leads or offline conversions import, Google Ads will only pull this data for Leads and Opportunities that have a value in the GCLID field.
- Lead: Custom 'GCLID' field
- Lead: Status History
- Opportunity: Amount
- Opportunity: Custom 'GCLID' field
- Opportunities: Stage History
This regularly downloaded information will be deleted within a few days, except for your upload history logs. These logs are available to you for 90 days, so you can view what conversions and conversion values were uploaded for which GCLIDs on which days. After 90 days, they’re deleted.
This means that we don't view or otherwise retrieve information that can be used to identify the people or businesses with which you're doing business (such as Lead or Opportunity Name).
Learn more about our customer data policies and how Google uses enhanced conversions data.
How GCLID-based offline conversion import works
When someone clicks your ad and goes to your website, your website captures a unique ID called a “Google click ID”, or “GCLID”, then stores it in a cookie. Google Ads uses this ID to determine which click on which ad gets credit for any future conversions.
When the customer submits a lead form on your website, your website will pass along the GCLID to Salesforce and store it within the corresponding lead and any future opportunities that are derived from this lead.
Google Ads will regularly check your Salesforce account to see if you’ve recorded any new important milestones that resulted from ads. (In the setup process, you’ll be able to pick which lead statuses and opportunity stages you want to track as conversions.) Google Ads will know if this milestone originated from a lead from an ad, because if it did, it will have that unique ID that your website stored and passed along to Salesforce. If so, Google Ads will count that milestone as a Google Ads conversion.
What you'll need to do
To make the processes work as described above, you’ll need to make some updates to your website, Salesforce account, and Google Ads account. If someone else manages the Salesforce account for your business, you’ll want that person’s help with some parts of this setup. Also, if a web developer maintains your website, you’ll need their help as well.
We’ll give you an overview of the setup process below. To view the complete instructions, review Import conversions from Salesforce, or click the links for each step below to go directly to that part of the setup. Also, make sure to read the requirements to ensure you’re ready to link your accounts.
How to set up enhanced conversions for leads for Salesforce
1. Accept Customer data terms
- Next to “Customer data terms”, select “View Terms” and review the “Policies and Additional Terms for Customer Data”.
- Click the “I have read and accept the terms on behalf of my company” checkbox.
- Click Agree. You’ll notice your status is updated to “Accepted”.
Note: These terms apply to your entire account or manager account. If you can’t view the terms, your account conversions are tracked by a manager account. If you do not have admin access to the Google Ads client account, you will need to contact the admin of the Google Ads manager account. The customer data terms must be accepted from the manager's account and any Google Ads manager account uploading on behalf of the manager account using cross-account tracking.
2. Turn on enhanced conversions for leads
In the “Enhanced conversions for leads” section, check the box for “Turn on enhanced conversions for leads”. Note that if you don’t check the box here, you’ll have a chance to do it while creating a conversion action.
3. Set up and configure your website
Unlike offline conversion tracking, enhanced conversion for leads doesn’t require you to modify your lead forms or customer relations management (CRM) systems to store Google Click ID (GCLID). Instead, it uses user provided data phone or email address from your lead to measure conversions.
Ensure the website has the Google tag or Google Tag Manager deployed sitewide. Follow instructions to set up and configure your website with enhanced conversions for leads using Google tag or Google Tag manager. You should either use Google tag or Google Tag Manager to ensure your online lead form submissions and user provided data are being captured correctly.
4. Set up automated import of your Salesforce events as conversions:
Learn more about How to import your Salesforce events as conversions.
How to set up offline conversion imports for Salesforce
Tip: Upgrade from offline conversion import to enhanced conversions for leads for more accurate reporting, easier data import, and engaged-view and cross-device conversion attribution.
To set up enhanced conversions for leads, you can either use an existing offline conversion import conversion action or create a new conversion action.
- Configure your Salesforce account. Create a custom GCLID field in your lead and opportunity objects. Without this ID, Google Ads won't know which click to attribute the conversion to. If someone else manages the Salesforce account for your company, you’ll need their help with this step.
- Adjust your Salesforce web-to-lead form. Modify the web-to-lead form on your website to upload the click ID (along with the rest of the form data) to Salesforce. Your Salesforce account administrator can help you with this step.
- Edit your website to save the click ID in a cookie. Google Ads will give you a piece of code to add to your website so you can collect and store the click ID. If you have a web developer, he or she can help you with this.
- Test that your system is working. Add the ID parameter to your website’s URL, submit a test lead, and see if the ID is passed along to Salesforce.
- Link your Google Ads and Salesforce accounts. You’ll need to enter a username and password for your Salesforce account. If someone else is the account administrator, ask them to give you a username and password, or join you for this part of the process. You may need to have administrative access to both accounts to link them. Ensure that the API is enabled for the specific Salesforce account.
- Decide which Salesforce events you want to track as conversions, and how often Google Ads should check for them.
- Import your conversions. You’re done setting up, and your Google Ads accounts will now regularly import your conversions from Salesforce.
What counts as a conversion?
A conversion is recorded every time a picklist field’s value in Leads or Opportunities objects changes and meets your event conditions. This may mean a lead or opportunity can get imported more than once if the event conditions are met multiple times.
If you're using the legacy integration with Salesforce, you can configure your Google Ads account to record a conversion for any or every lead status and opportunity stage you track in your Salesforce account. Google Ads will record a conversion every time a lead or an opportunity is set to the respective status or stage. Note: If a Salesforce user skips a status or stage and sets it to the next or last one, Google Ads will not record a conversion for the skipped stages.
Example
Your Salesforce account has the following Opportunity stages: 1. "Sales Qualified," 2. "Needs Analysis," 3. "Proposal," 4. "Negotiation," 5. "Closed Won," and 6. "Closed Lost."
In Google Ads, you choose to record a conversion every time the following stages are reached: 3. “Proposal," 4. “Negotiation," and 5. “Closed Won."
In Salesforce, a user moves the Opportunity from 1. "Sales Qualified" to 3. "Proposal," and then later marks it as 5. “Closed Won."
In Google Ads, you'll see conversions for "Proposal" and "Closed Won," but not for "Negotiation" (since the user never set the opportunity to "Negotiation").
About Salesforce data in Google Ads
Google Ads regularly imports the Google Click ID (if you use offline conversion import) or email/phone number user-provided data (if you use enhanced conversions for leads), and relevant event data from Salesforce integrations into Google Ads. Salesforce isn’t responsible for any impact on that data arising from the transmission.
For more information on Salesforce data in Google Ads, click the links below.
To make sure your Google Ads conversion data reflects the offline conversions tracked in your Salesforce Sales Cloud account(s), Google Ads needs to regularly retrieve and store some information about your lead statuses and opportunity stages.
After you begin using this solution, Google Ads needs to store certain data from your Salesforce account in order to maintain a consistent understanding of the events you want to treat as conversions. The data we store includes your account's Org Name and Org ID, and copies of your account's Lead Status and Opportunity Stage value (such as "qualified" and "deal won," respectively).
In addition to this information, Google Ads will regularly retrieve the following fields from your Sales Cloud account to identify which conversions need to be recorded in Google Ads. You can ingest any source field configured in the mapping such as email, phone, or other fields mapped to "conversion_value" or "conversion_currency". The raw upload data isn’t available for download, but the error logs are available to you for 30 days.
Note: If you’re using the legacy integration with Salesforce for enhanced conversions for leads or offline conversions import, Google Ads will only pull this data for Leads and Opportunities that have a value in the GCLID field.
- Lead: Custom 'GCLID' field
- Lead: Status History
- Opportunity: Amount
- Opportunity: Custom 'GCLID' field
- Opportunities: Stage History
This regularly downloaded information will be deleted within a few days, except for your upload history logs. These logs are available to you for 90 days, so you can view what conversions and conversion values were uploaded for which GCLIDs on which days. After 90 days, they’re deleted.
This means that we don't view or otherwise retrieve information that can be used to identify the people or businesses with which you're doing business (such as Lead or Opportunity Name).
Learn more about our customer data policies and how Google uses enhanced conversions data.
We understand the importance and sensitivity of your data, and we're committed to protecting the confidentiality and security of the data you share with us.
More specifically, here is how we treat your Salesforce data:
- Limited data use. We won’t use your data files for any purpose other than to update your conversion metrics.
- Limited data access. We won’t share your data files with other Google teams other than to update your conversion metrics. We use employee access controls to protect your data files from unauthorized access.
- Limited data sharing. We won’t share your data files with any third party, including other advertisers, except that we may share this data for legal reasons, such as to meet any applicable law, regulation, legal process or enforceable governmental request.
We’re also committed to ensuring that the systems we use to store your data files remain secure and reliable. We have dedicated security engineering teams to protect against external threats to our systems, and we store all your data files in an encrypted format to protect against unauthorized access.
Learn more about How Google uses conversion event data.
