Definition
Also written: offline conversion tracking, OCI
Offline conversion import sends outcomes that happen outside the website — a qualified lead, a booked job, closed revenue — back to the advertising platform, matched to the original click. It lets bidding optimise toward revenue rather than form fills.
The mechanism is a click identifier stored at form submission, written to the CRM, and returned with the outcome and its value once known.
Latency is the constraint that catches people out. If deals close over months, the platform learns from a delayed and partial signal, and short optimisation windows never see the outcome at all.
The usual error
Where this goes wrong in practice
Importing every lead at the same nominal value. The platform then optimises for lead count under a different name, which is the problem this was supposed to solve.
The work behind the term
Paid Media & Ads Automation
Plan, launch, automate, and optimize paid campaigns across search, social, display, retargeting, and lead-generation channels.
Marketing Automation & CRM Integration
Unify lead capture, attribution, nurturing, pipeline management, and customer communication across your CRM stack.
Related terms
Multi-touch attribution (MTA)
Multi-touch attribution distributes credit for a conversion across the marketing touchpoints that preceded it, using a rule (first touch, last touch, linear, time decay) or a data-driven model. It describes observed sequence; it does not establish that any touchpoint caused the outcome.
DefinitionLead scoring
Lead scoring assigns a numeric value to a lead based on fit attributes (industry, size, role) and behaviour (pages viewed, emails opened, forms submitted), to prioritise follow-up. Its accuracy depends entirely on whether the model was built from outcomes rather than assumptions.
DefinitionPerformance Max (PMax)
Performance Max is a Google Ads campaign type that serves across Search, Display, YouTube, Discover, Gmail and Maps from one budget, with placement, audience and creative decisions automated. It reports far less channel-level detail than the campaign types it replaced.
DefinitionConsent mode
Consent mode is Google’s mechanism for adjusting tag behaviour according to a visitor’s consent choices, sending cookieless pings when consent is denied so that conversions can be modelled rather than simply lost. Its output is estimated, and reporting distinguishes observed from modelled data.
DefinitionGA4 key events
Key events are the GA4 events a property has marked as significant — the renamed successor to "conversions" in that interface. They drive reporting and can be imported into advertising platforms, and their counts may include modelled as well as observed data.
DefinitionIncrementality testing
Incrementality testing measures what a marketing activity actually caused, by comparing a group exposed to it against a comparable group that was not. Geographic holdouts, audience splits and time-based tests are the common designs, and the output is a causal estimate rather than an attributed share.
DefinitionMarketing mix modelling (MMM)
Marketing mix modelling uses aggregate historical data — spend, sales, seasonality, price, external factors — to estimate each channel’s contribution statistically. Because it works on aggregates rather than individual journeys, it is unaffected by cookie loss and consent restrictions.
Definition