Offline conversion

An offline conversion is a conversion that completes somewhere the ad platform cannot see - a phone call, a signed contract, a deal marked won in a CRM weeks after the original click. The website part of the journey (the ad click, the form fill) is trackable; the part that actually makes money happens offline.

Offline conversion tracking closes that gap by uploading the outcome back to the ad platform after the fact. Each uploaded conversion carries the click identifier that started the journey - a gclid, wbraid, or gbraid for Google Ads - plus a conversion name, timestamp, and optionally a value. The platform matches the identifier to the original click and credits the right campaign, keyword, and ad.

The payoff is bidding quality. Without offline data, an ad platform optimizes toward form fills, treating a tire-kicker and a five-figure deal identically. Fed real outcomes, it learns which clicks become revenue and bids accordingly. The whole mechanism depends on one unglamorous prerequisite: the click ID must be captured at form-fill time and stored next to the lead, or there is nothing to match the sale against later.

SheetLink Forms handles that prerequisite as a side effect of normal capture. The sl.js embed attaches gclid, wbraid, and gbraid to every submission, and each lead lands as a spreadsheet row with its click ID in a column. When a lead later closes, your sheet already pairs the identifier with the outcome - mark the row, export, and upload to Google Ads offline conversion import. No CRM integration or middleware required to keep the chain intact.

The capture half is covered in the guide on capturing gclid in forms; delivery to your sheet is on how it works.