“We get plenty of leads from ads, but only a handful buy.” We hear this often. The cause is usually not bad advertising but what the ads are learning from. Google sees only the lead on your website: someone left a phone number. Who among those people later bought, and who just asked the price and vanished, it does not know. So it goes looking for even more people who leave leads, not for people who pay.
Passing sales back to Google fixes this. It is called offline conversions: a “conversion” is simply a result you count (a lead, a purchase), and “offline” means the purchase happened outside the website: on a phone call, in a salon, in a messenger, in your CRM. Below: how it works, what you can do yourself and where money gets lost most often. We checked the facts against Google’s help pages on 18 October 2026.
How it works
A chain of three links.
- The lead arrives with a click ID. When a person clicks an ad, Google gives that click a unique number: the Google Click ID, or GCLID. The form on your website must save this number together with the lead, otherwise you cannot tell later which click the person came from.
- You mark who bought. In a spreadsheet or CRM, next to the lead, you put “bought” and the amount.
- Sales go back to Google. It receives the click number, the “sale” event, the time and the amount. Now it knows which clicks led to money.
Two ways to pass sales back
A Google Sheet with a scheduled import. This is the simple route that suits almost any business, including one with a local CRM or none at all. You keep a spreadsheet, connect it in Google Ads as a source and choose how often it is pulled. In the account: Goals → Conversions → Uploads → the Schedules tab, the plus button, then choose Google Sheets in the Source drop-down. Data usually shows up in reports within 24–48 hours, and after creating a new conversion action it is worth waiting 4–6 hours before uploading anything.
Ready-made integrations in Data Manager. This is a section of Google Ads (Tools → Data Manager) that connects your account to other services. According to Google’s help, it is the simplest way to set up the transfer, and HubSpot and Salesforce are among the services you can connect this way. For other CRMs there is the Zapier intermediary: it is also connected through Data Manager and passes offline conversions from many services. Whether a connector exists for your particular CRM has to be checked separately. We found no ready-made integrations for Ukrainian CRMs in Google’s help, so for them the practical routes are a spreadsheet or Zapier.
There is also enhanced conversions for leads. Along with the click ID, it sends “fingerprints” (hashes) of the email or phone number the person left. Google presents it as a supplement to GCLID, not a replacement: the click ID still has to be passed. In our practice it is useful when the lead came by phone call or messenger and there was no form with a click ID: if the number or email ended up in the CRM, it can be used. But the time window is different: this method works for up to 63 days, while with a click ID you can pass a sale within 90 days of the click.
Three places where money gets lost
1. The click ID does not reach the lead. The most common reason a sale cannot be passed back. Check it yourself in five minutes. Open your website with ?gclid=TeSter-123 added to the address, leave a test lead and see whether that value appeared in your CRM or spreadsheet. If not, look for the cause. The click ID is case-sensitive, and a site or plugin may turn capitals into lowercase. A chain of redirects (http to https, to the www version) can cut off everything after the question mark. Auto-tagging must be switched on in the account. One more nuance: on iPhones, other parameters (gbraid and wbraid) sometimes arrive instead of GCLID, and your site must not strip them. Leads that came by phone bypassing the form have no click ID at all: they have to be added manually or via call tracking.
2. The sale was passed, but not the amount. A conversion without an amount teaches Google to look for quantity, not money. Check in the report what amount Google sees for sales. It has happened that a manager entered the real amount in the CRM, while the account received a nominal one from the integration. If you do not see this, good; if you do, it is too early to switch the strategy to value. Separately, about cancelled sales: Google lets you adjust a conversion you already passed (change the amount or retract it), and you can do this for roughly 55 days. Whether to do it always is a matter of dispute. Some practitioners think you should adjust everything that was cancelled. Others say that at small volumes (a few dozen sales a month) adjustments only shrink the sample, so they make sense with an expensive order or obviously fake orders. Google gives no official figure for “from what volume to adjust”.
3. Passed too late. According to Google’s help, for automated bidding you should upload sales at least daily, and if that is not possible, on a consistent schedule, for example every two days or weekly. You can pass a sale no later than 90 days after the click; if your sales cycle is longer (furniture, renovation, equipment), part of the sales simply will not be reflected.
When to teach on sales and when just to look
This is the owners’ most frequent question, and here the difference of opinion is clear.
Practitioners name different thresholds from which a strategy can be “taught on sales”: some set the line at 15–30 sales a month, others, like us for ordinary conversions, go by 30 conversions in 30 days. Google’s help names no hard minimum. It says that the Target CPA strategy can be started even without conversion history, and the number 30 appears only as a guideline for evaluating results over the last 30 days.
In our practice this order works. First, sales simply go into the report as a secondary action that does not affect bidding: you see how much money the ads really brought. When enough sales accumulate (for us that is from 15–30 a month per account, but this is our practice, not a Google requirement), you can make them the primary action the strategy learns from. With two or three sales a month there is nothing for the strategy to learn from, and it is better to trust it less.
After connecting, do not rush to conclusions: practitioners advise judging the effect no sooner than 2–4 weeks, and for Target ROAS Google recommends waiting about 6 weeks until the campaign steadily receives conversion values.
What to ask your contractor
- Is the Google click ID passed with the lead, and can we see it in our CRM or spreadsheet?
- How often do sales go to Google, and on what schedule?
- What amount does Google see for sales, and does it match the real one?
- Are sales only in the report now, or do they already affect bidding? And why exactly so?
- What about leads that came by phone call or messenger?
Summary
Ads learn from what you show them. Show leads: you get more leads. Show sales: you get a chance at more buyers. Three steps to start: check that the click ID reaches the lead; agree who marks “bought” and the amount, and where; set up regular transfer by spreadsheet or integration. At first it is just a report, and only then training.
How we run advertising is in the sections on search advertising and Performance Max. What your ads currently count as a lead is explained in the article what your ads count as a lead.
Want a free audit of your Google Ads account? Send us a request: we will look at your account, check whether the click ID reaches the lead and tell you whether it is time to pass sales back.