Offline Conversion Tracking with Fluent Forms

Fluent Forms is a great way to capture leads from a WordPress website. But if you run Google Ads there is a gap in the system.

Google can see the click and the form submission. But it can't see what happens after the lead arrives.

It can't see if the lead was a good fit, if the enquiry turned into a booking or a quote, or if the lead became a customer.

Without that information you can't optimise campaigns for real business outcomes. You're stuck at optimising for form submissions regardless of the lead quality.

In this article I'll show how I helped a new Litiro client set up offline conversion tracking for Fluent Forms so they could optimise their Google Ads for better quality leads.

Preparing Fluent Forms for offline conversion tracking

Their setup was pretty standard. Fluent Forms captures the lead and sends it to the sales team by email.

This works fine for responding to enquiries. But it doesn't help when you want to track what happens to the lead afterwards. You need offline conversions for that.

To upload offline conversions you need two types of information:

• The lead contact details like first name, last name, email and so on.
• And, for best results, the ad tracking information that came with the click, e.g. a GCLID parameter.

To do this:

1. Make sure that Auto-tagging is enabled in your Google Ads account.
2. In your Fluent Forms setup, add a hidden form field called landing_page_url or something similar. Set the value to {http_referer}.

Fluent Forms will then send the landing page URL and the GCLID and other tracking parameters with the name, email etc.

But you'll only get the tracking information if the visitor submits the form from your landing page. If they navigate away before filling in the form you lose the tracking information. There are ways to work around this. The exact method depends on what privacy laws apply in your country and how your site is set up. Contact me if you need help with this.

Fluent Forms Pro can send a webhook when the form is submitted. We use this feature to get the data from Fluent Forms to Litiro so we can upload offline conversions later.

The data capture flow looks like this

1. Google Ads click to a landing page.
2. Visitor submits a Fluent Form.
3. Fluent Forms handles the submission normally (in their case it sends an email to the business). This doesn't have to change.
4. Fluent Forms sends a webhook to Litiro.
5. Litiro stores the lead contact details, along with the ad tracking information.

Uploading Fluent Forms leads as offline conversions

We've now got the lead and tracking information stored in Litiro. And Litiro can upload offline conversions without any fuss. No spreadsheets or CSV needed.

All that we have to do is update Litiro as the lead progresses through the sales funnel. Each update uploads a conversion in Google Ads.

Updating the progress in Litiro is easy. There is a simple interface to do it manually, or it can be automated by connecting Litiro to other systems:

• booking systems
• CRMs
• job management platforms
• invoicing software

Once the setup is done it runs in the background.

• Fluent Forms continues to capture enquiries as normal.
• Litiro keeps track of what happens to those leads and sends the important outcomes back to Google Ads.

This allows you to optimise your campaigns for better conversions, not just for more leads.

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