Send your Salesforce deals back to Google Ads. Offline conversions for investor PPC

Why are form fills the wrong thing to optimize for?

Google's automated bidding learns from whatever you tell it is a conversion. Tell it a form fill is a conversion and it gets very good at finding people who fill in forms. Your cost per lead looks great in Google Ads while your cost per contract in Salesforce keeps climbing, and nobody can say which campaigns, keywords or search terms produce the sellers who actually sign.

Investor PPC has a long funnel with a lot of loss at every step: lead, contact, appointment, offer, contract, closed. Only your CRM knows how far each click got. Offline conversion import is the bridge. Salesforce tells Google which clicks became appointments, contracts and closed deals, and Google bids toward more of those instead of more forms.

It also changes what you can see. With imports running, Google Ads can show cost per appointment and cost per contract by campaign and search term, next to the numbers you already watch in Salesforce. The two will never match to the dollar, but they stop telling different stories.

What changed in 2025 and 2026?

A lot of setup guides online still describe Google's old Salesforce integration and its "milestones". That integration is gone. Here's what changed, from Google's own help pages:

Google also recommends enhanced conversions for leads over the older click-ID-only import. It adds hashed contact details from your form, so a conversion can still be matched when a click ID is missing. Google says to keep sending the GCLID whenever you have it, and that it's required if you don't collect contact details with the Google tag.

Which Salesforce stages should you send?

Map your funnel to a few conversion actions, then decide which one Google bids on. In Google Ads, primary conversion actions drive bidding and show in the Conversions column. Secondary ones are for observation only, so you can watch contracts and closed deals without letting a thin number steer the budget.

Volume is the catch. A team signing a handful of contracts a month gives Google very little to learn from, while appointments happen several times as often. For most investor teams I'd make the qualified appointment the primary conversion, send contracts and closed deals as secondary, and switch the primary to contracts once there are enough of them to steer by.

Timing matters too. Google only accepts click-based conversions within 90 days of the click. A seller who clicks in March and signs in August won't import. That's fine; it's one more reason the earlier stages carry the bidding.

How do you set it up?

1. Turn on auto-tagging in Google Ads. It adds a GCLID to the landing page address on every ad click. Without it there's nothing to send back.
2. Capture the GCLID on your site. Google publishes a short script that reads the GCLID from the address, stores it for 90 days and fills a hidden field on your forms. Put it on every page of the site, because sellers click around before they fill anything in.
3. Add a GCLID field to Lead and Opportunity in Salesforce. Google's setup page asks for a 255-character text field on both, read-only for users, with the lead field mapped to the opportunity field so the value survives lead conversion.
4. Turn on field history tracking for Lead Status and Opportunity Stage. Google reads the time of the status or stage change from that history and uses it as the conversion time.
5. Test every form. Submit a test lead with ?gclid=test on the end of the page address, check that the value lands on the lead, convert it, and check it on the opportunity. Then do the same for every other form and landing page.
6. Connect Salesforce in Google Ads. Create a conversion action that imports from a CRM, choose Salesforce, sign in, pick the object (Lead or Opportunity), set the condition (for example, Stage changes to Contract Signed) and map the GCLID. For enhanced conversions for leads, also map email and phone; Google prefers email and needs at least one of the two.
7. Use a dedicated integration user with only the access the connection needs. Not the owner's login, and not a rep who might leave. When that user is deactivated, the imports stop.
8. Set a daily schedule and give it a day. Google says a new conversion action needs 4 to 6 hours before uploads, conversions can take up to 24 hours to show, and the first run only looks back 14 days.

One limit catches investor orgs more than any other: Google's Salesforce connector reads Leads and Opportunities. If your deals live on a custom object, such as a Property or Deal record, the connector can't see them. You can track the stages you need on an opportunity linked to that record, or send conversions through a file or another tool. Decide this before you build, not after.

What about phone calls?

A lot of motivated sellers call instead of filling in a form, so a setup that only handles forms misses some of your best leads. There are three kinds of calls to think about:

• Calls straight from the ad, through a call asset or call-only ad with a Google forwarding number. Google already knows about the call. To tell it what happened next, its phone call import matches on the caller's number and the call start time, so your phone system needs to log both on the Salesforce record.
• Calls from your website after an ad click. These only tie back to the click if your call tracking swaps numbers per visitor (dynamic number insertion with a number pool). Check whether your call tracking writes the click ID or the campaign onto the lead it creates in Salesforce, or sends the conversion to Google itself. Pick one path. Doing both counts the same seller twice.
• Calls from a mailer number, even when the seller found you by searching your name. That isn't an ad click, and forcing it into Google Ads makes the numbers worse, not better.

Whichever way calls come in, the lead your phone system creates in Salesforce has to carry its source and, where there is one, the click ID. If it doesn't, the import quietly skips every seller who called. More on getting calls onto the right record in dialers in Salesforce.

Should you send a value with each conversion?

Yes, if you can do it consistently. A value lets Google bid toward money instead of a count, which matters when one campaign brings in assignment-fee deals and another brings in properties you keep.

• Closed deals: the fee or profit, from the same field your ROI reports use. Gross on some deals and net on others makes the value useless.
• Contracts and appointments: a fixed estimate, such as your average fee times the share of contracts that close. Revisit it every quarter.
• Leads: Google's upgrade notes say expected revenue carries over for opportunities but isn't supported for leads, so set the value on the conversion action instead.

If you don't map a value, Google uses the conversion action's default. That's a reasonable start while you get the basics working.

What usually goes wrong

• The GCLID is only on one form. The landing page has it; the contact page, the chat widget and the second landing page don't.
• It doesn't survive conversion. The lead has a GCLID, the opportunity doesn't, so every contract arrives with nothing to match.
• Stages get skipped. A rep moves a deal from New straight to Contract, so the appointment conversion never fires. A date field such as "appointment held on", set by a Flow whenever a deal passes that point, is a safer trigger than the stage itself.
• A status gets renamed. Someone tidies the picklist, the condition no longer matches, and imports drop to zero without an error anyone sees.
• The connection belongs to someone who left. Google says a failed event isn't retried automatically, so days can go missing for good. The admin handover plan covers the logins that should never belong to one person.
• Two primary conversions count the same thing. A tag-based form conversion and an imported "new lead" both drive bidding, and Google thinks every lead is two.
• Bidding on closed deals too early. Small numbers make the bidding jumpy. Watch them as secondary first.

How do you know it's working?

• Once a week, compare counts. Appointments imported to Google Ads against a Salesforce report of appointments from leads with a GCLID, for the same week. They won't match exactly, because of the 90-day window and Google's own attribution, but they should be close.
• Watch for blanks. A Salesforce report of PPC form leads with an empty GCLID should be close to empty. If it isn't, a form or a landing page isn't capturing it.
• Check the schedule. Look at the last run in Data manager every week. Failed runs don't fix themselves.
• Judge spend in Salesforce. Google Ads will show conversions, but the budget decision belongs on cost per contract and profit by campaign from your CRM, using the original source. See which campaign gets credit and the cost per deal calculator.

In the org I run, PPC sits in the same campaign ROI reports as TV, mail and every other source: appointments, contracts and booked revenue by campaign and market, checked against the books. Offline conversion import doesn't replace that. It gives Google the same answer your reports already give you.

Questions

Related guides

Sources

Checked in October 2026. Salesforce and vendor features change with each release, so check the linked page before you rely on a detail.

1. Google Ads Help: How to set up a Salesforce integration. GCLID fields on Lead and Opportunity, field history tracking, the hidden form field, testing with gclid=test, the 90-day limit, the 14-day first import, the daily schedule and no automatic retries
2. Google Ads Help: Legacy Salesforce integration for conversions upgrade FAQ. End of legacy support on May 31, 2025, one Salesforce object per connection, expected revenue for opportunities only
3. Google Ads Help: About enhanced conversions for leads. How hashed lead details are matched, when the GCLID is still needed, and the move of uploads to the Data Manager API from June 15, 2026
4. Google Ads Help: Set up offline conversion imports using GCLID. Auto-tagging, the hidden GCLID field and the 90-day storage script
5. Google Ads Help: Using Data Manager with enhanced conversions for leads. Google's advice to choose a qualified or converted lead as the conversion goal
6. Google Ads Help: About primary and secondary conversion actions. Primary actions drive bidding; secondary actions are for observation
7. Google Ads Help: Import phone call conversions. Caller number and call start time, Google forwarding numbers, and imported call conversions that can't be removed
8. WhatConverts: Dynamic number insertion. How number pools tie website calls back to ad clicks