Building a strong measurement foundation

Intro

Today’s lead-to-sale journey is more complex than ever where your prospective customers often take long and winding paths to conversion that span multiple touchpoints.

Consider how important many of their decisions are: choosing a university, a retirement plan, a software provider, or a new CRM system. These aren’t spur-of-the-moment choices; they’re journeys that require a lot of careful thought and deliberation. And often, critical decision-making moments occur offline, beyond our immediate view.

Measurement gives you the building blocks to understand the full customer journey – how prospects interact with your ads, which channels are most effective, and where optimisation can lead to even better results. This interconnected data isn’t just insightful – it’s your competitive edge.

Let’s explore the two core components of building a strong measurement foundation:

• Collecting online first-party data
• Connecting your offline data

Collecting online first-party data

Let’s begin with collecting your online data. To effectively understand your customers and optimise your campaigns, gathering accurate first-party data is essential. This starts with implementing the Google tag across your website. This versatile tag enables you to track valuable actions on your website like form submissions. You can use Tag Diagnostics to check if you’ve set up your Google tag correctly and to troubleshoot any challenges.

If you want to enhance the accuracy of your conversion tracking, the next step is to set up enhanced conversions. This helps make sure your measurement is complete and without gaps. It securely sends hashed versions of user-provided data, such as email addresses or phone numbers, from your website to Google. By matching this hashed data with signed-in Google accounts, enhanced conversions for web can more accurately attribute online conversions to your marketing campaign, even when users switch devices.

Connecting your offline data

Once your measurement foundation is set for your website, it’s time to turn your attention to what your prospective customers and leads do offline. It’s critical to collect and connect your offline conversion data from your CRM back to Google Ads. This connects the dots between digital and offline touchpoints so you can gain a clearer understanding of which online actions translate into offline value, such as qualified or closed leads.

This is where Google Ads data manager comes in. Think of it as your mission control centre for connecting online and offline data sources across Google solutions. It simplifies tag implementation, CRM connections with platforms like Salesforce, Hubspot and BigQuery, and offline measurement, ensuring your audience lists and conversion data are up to date and complete in one central place.

No more manual data wrangling, or shifting between different platforms and manual uploads. There’s no duplication of tasks, there’s little to no need for code, and it’s a much more efficient way to manage and leverage your first-party data for your marketing.