In short
Offline conversions are outcomes that happen outside your website or app: in-store purchases, call-centre sales, dealership visits, policy issuance, loan disbursal. Ad platforms cannot see these events unless you deliver them, matched to the click or the person, in a form campaigns can act on. Matching relies on click IDs carried through your CRM, such as GCLID and fbclid, alongside hashed identifiers like email and phone captured at the point of sale. The delivery paths differ by platform: Meta Offline CAPI, Google offline conversion import and Store Sales, and the offline event endpoints for Snap and TikTok. The payoff is straightforward. Platforms optimize on what they can see, so feeding them the offline truth moves budget toward the campaigns that drive real revenue rather than the ones that merely drive cheap online actions. For businesses where the sale closes offline, this is often the single largest gap between reported performance and actual performance.
Delivery paths
Meta Offline CAPI, Google Store Sales and Offline Conversion Import, Snap and TikTok offline events. Matching uses click IDs carried through your CRM plus hashed identifiers.
Why do offline conversions matter?
Platforms optimize on what they can see. Feeding them the offline truth moves budgets toward campaigns that drive real revenue, which is the whole point.
How do offline conversions reach the ad platform?
A car dealership captures a lead online and closes the sale in the showroom two weeks later. By storing the click ID with the lead and sending the completed sale back through offline conversion import, the platform credits the showroom purchase to the campaign that generated the lead.
Reference: Google Ads Help, about offline conversion imports