Google Analytics 4: A Step-By-Step Guide To Offline Conversion Tracking

Are you ready to start tracking your offline conversions for a more comprehensive look at your marketing campaign results?

Can you get ahead of your competition by using in-person Google Analytics 4 conversion insights to improve your digital marketing campaigns?

How do you make sure your online marketing is contributing to in-person sales?

Measuring your online marketing campaign performance can be pretty straightforward – especially with Google Analytics 4 and other advanced tracking tools at your fingertips.

But what happens when a customer follows an online lead but doesn’t actually complete the transaction until they’re offline?

Sales that take place in real life are more difficult to track without an effective offline conversion tracking process.

If you or your clients have brick-and-mortar stores and locations, offline conversion tracking software is essential for successful marketing campaigns.

Offline conversion tracking allows you to thoroughly monitor how consumers are moving through your sales funnel, giving you the power to adjust and improve your customer experience.

Let’s learn how your agency can combine Google Analytics 4 (GA4) with Call Tracking by CallRail to uncover hidden call data and maximize ROI.

In This Step-By-Step Guide

• Why Should You Track Offline, Phone Call Conversions In Google Analytics 4?
• How Can You Track Advanced Phone Call Analytics In Google Analytics 4?
• Step-By-Step Guide To Creating Call Tracking Conversion Events In Google Analytics 4

The most common form of offline conversions is phone calls, so let’s learn innovative ways to get the most information from your calls.

Why Should You Track Offline, Phone Call Conversions In Google Analytics 4?

Phone calls are often the primary source of business inquiries in the service industry, and you need to be able to know exactly where your leads are coming from, especially when phone calls are a part of the journey.

The stronger your understanding of your lead’s journey, the better you can make your future marketing campaigns.

You Can Get Lead Generation Insights By Tracking Phone Calls

With advanced call tracking, you can gain Google Analytics 4 call insights such as:

• How long did a lead speak to a rep?
• Was the call answered or not?
• Did the rep mark the lead as qualified?
• Was the lead tagged as interested in a particular product or service line?

From there, you can:

• Dive into detailed call insights: CallRailʼs AI-powered call analytics transcribes and records all customer conversations, and it automatically classifies and qualifies callers.
• Fine-tune your ads approach: Link each caller to the piece of marketing that drove them to your clientʼs business, helping to identify top-performing strategies. Use conversational data to discover potential new keywords for future campaigns.
• Track all inbound calls: Analyze all of your client’s phone calls, not just those that came from ad clicks.

Now, you’ll be able to double down on PPC and SEO campaigns that are truly bringing in customers.

Although phone inquiries usually represent high-intent prospects, it can be difficult to know which marketing channel drove a particular lead to call your business – that’s where Google Analytics 4 comes in.

What Is Google Analytics 4?

Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is the newest version of Google’s website traffic and engagement tracker.

It can help you understand how many people are visiting your website, what pages they’re reading, and what information makes them become a customer.

GA4 will allow you to seamlessly measure your customer’s journey across multiple platforms – this includes phone calls and offline conversions.

As your agency makes the switch to GA4, you can enhance your experience with phone call conversions to effectively track and report the journey of your clients’ leads.

Does Google Analytics 4 Track Calls By Default?

No. Googleʼs native call tracking doesn’t effectively analyze calls.

Right out of the gate, GA4 only tracks the following conversion events:

• purchase (web and app).
• first_open (app only).
• in_app_purchase (app only).
• app_store_subscription_convert (app only).
• app_store_subscription_renew (app only).

To properly attribute phone calls within GA4, you may need to manually create custom conversion events.

“With the move to GA4, goals are now conversions. GA4 is much more intelligent and automated about conversion tracking, so setting up goals based on limited conversion criteria is no longer necessary.

Conversions in GA4 are based on events. Thus, your conversions will be event_name, with the parameter modifying the event. You can now mark an event as a conversion.”

Also, even though GA4 has the ability to track clicks on a phone number, they still miss out on a large percentage of calls where users type the numbers directly into their phones.

How Can I Track Advanced Phone Call Analytics In Google Analytics 4?

Since GA4 does not effectively track phone calls, implementing Call Tracking by CallRail into your Google Analytics strategy can help you gain more actionable marketing insights than using Google Analytics 4 alone.

CallRail integrates seamlessly with GA4 to enhance your call-tracking process.

Step-By-Step Guide To Creating Call Tracking Conversion Events In Google Analytics 4

CallRail’s full guide to Google Analytics 4 lays out how to set up your goals (now known as “conversions”) in GA4. Here are the quick details.

To manually mark an event as a conversion in GA4, you can configure the event in two ways:

• Track an existing event as a conversion.
• Create a new conversion event from the event name.

To start tracking an existing event as a conversion:

1. In the left navigation, click Admin > Events.
2. Locate the event in the Existing events table.
3. In the event’s “Mark as conversion” column, click to turn the switch on. If you have CallRail you will see conversions under the following names: phone_call, form, chat, sms.

To create a conversion from the event name:

1. In the left navigation, select Admin > Conversions.
2. Click New Conversion Event.
3. Enter the name of the new event. Be sure to use the exact event name with proper capitalization.
4. Click Save.

Sign up for a free trial of CallRail’s services and discover what advanced call tracking can do for your business.

Start Using Phone Call Event Data To Supercharge Your Marketing

You shouldn’t have to guess which marketing tactics are working for you, and to what extent.

With call tracking software, you can know for sure.

CallRail will help you better “understand what makes your phones ring.” And with this new set of data, you and your clients can start filling the information gaps in your process.

Now, you can get the full scope of your ROI and keep track of all the major conversion events within a lead’s lifecycle.

Once you start incorporating offline conversion tracking into your strategy, you’ll notice an improvement in your agent-client relationship, as you prove campaign value through data collection.

Your clients just want assurance that their marketing efforts are paying off, and leveraging Google Analytics 4 with CallRail’s Call Tracking can help you prove that all aspects of their marketing campaigns (including phone calls) are working successfully.