How to Track Which Google Ads Bring Paying SAAS Users

If you're running Google Ads for your SAAS, it's not enough to track free trial signups. You need to know which ads are actually bringing in paying users.

To do this, you need to tell Google when your user converts from trial to paid. Google has a feature called offline conversions for exactly this scenario.

But don't get too excited.

• Google won't accept offline conversions (payments) that happen more than 63 days* after the click. If you offer a 30-day trial and monthly billing, you might get two payments in this period. That's probably not enough to extrapolate to full user lifetime value (LTV).

• If you don't have a lot of signups or your trial is long, the lag between signup and first payment makes the data less helpful at the start.

Still, it's worth setting up because knowing if your Google Ads are bringing in paying users is important, even if Google's automated bidding won't use the data.

Changes You’ll Need to Make to Your User Management System

Assuming you're OK with the limits, you'll need to make two changes to your user management system:

1. Capture the link between the Google Ad that caused the user to sign up and the user. Think of this as a foreign key that links your users table to Google's ad data about the same person.
2. Notify Google when your user converts from trial to paid, or every time a payment is received.

Let's dive in...

Step 1: Capture Google's Identifiers

Google offers six ways to identify users:

• GCLID (sent as a URL parameter when an ad is clicked).
• GBRAID (sent as a URL parameter when an ad is clicked).
• WBRAID (sent as a URL parameter when an ad is clicked).
• Hashed email (through enhanced conversions).
• Hashed phone number (through enhanced conversions).
• Session data.

GCLID, GBRAID, and WBRAID aren't always present. Sometimes they're not set. Other times, they get stripped off by browser privacy settings.

It's best to capture as many of these as you can during signup and associate them with your user — e.g., store them in your users table.

Hashing the email and phone number is simple enough with SHA256. You have to normalise the email and phone number before hashing:

• Remove leading and trailing whitespaces.
• Convert the text to lowercase.
• Format phone numbers according to the E.164 standard.
• Remove all periods (.) that precede the domain name in gmail.com and googlemail.com email addresses.

Step 2: Tell Google When You Get Paid

There are currently four ways of uploading offline conversions to Google Ads. I've ranked them by developer effort required, from most to least:

1. Google Ads API. Getting approval is onerous and might not be warranted if this is the only thing you're using it for. (Update: deprecated and replaced by the DataManager API
2. CSV Upload. It can be automated by giving Google an endpoint to fetch the file. If you're not using a CRM system, this would be my preference. (This doesn't currently support all click identifiers.)
3. Zapier.
4. Native CRM integrations. Some CRM systems (Salesforce, Hubspot etc) have built-in tools for sending offline conversions.

Using the Data Once You Have It

The technical stuff is relatively straightforward (at least for a developer), but how you use this data to make your ads better needs a bit more thought. You'll want to think about:

• What conversion actions you should track.
• Which ones you optimise your ads for.
• When and how to optimise your ads for offline conversions.
• If you want to track value (money) and how you're going to use it to make your ads more profitable.
• The impact of privacy regulations on what you can track.

Talk to Me About This Stuff

I'm always happy to talk about this kind of thing. I speak Google Ads and I speak SaaS. Contact me if you'd like to have a chat.

* (There is a legacy way to upload data <90 days, but I suspect it'll be deprecated, so I've ignored it.)

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