Do I need to store the GCLID for Google Ads offline conversions? What if the form is embedded?

Short answer: for a manual upload, yes. The GCLID has to travel with the lead, from the click all the way to the CRM, and it has to still be there when the deal closes.

The long answer is that it's a relay race, and the baton gets dropped in four places. Knowing which one you're dropping it in is most of the work.

Drop one: the embedded form. The form lives on another domain, inside an iframe, and the page URL with the gclid never reaches it. Test: submit a lead from the embedded version, open the contact, and look for the GCLID. It's usually empty.

Drop two: the redirect. Somewhere between the ad and the landing page, a redirect strips the parameter. Test: click your own ad URL, and check whether the address bar still shows ?gclid= when the page finishes loading.

Drop three: the return visit. The lead clicks on Monday, thinks, and comes back on Thursday by typing your address. The parameter is gone, and any cookie that held it may have expired too. On Safari, cookies written by JavaScript are capped at 7 days, and at 24 hours when the visitor arrived through a link from a known tracker.

Drop four: the rebuild. Someone redesigns the form and the hidden field quietly disappears. Nobody notices until sales stop matching. There's no test for this other than looking, on a schedule.

The standard fix is a hidden field that reads gclid from the URL and saves it on the lead. It's a good fix. It works right up until one of the four things above happens, which is usually around the time you stop checking.

Two habits make it sturdier. Save the GCLID on the lead record at submit, not in a cookie, because a record can't expire. And test the ugly paths on purpose, not just the happy one you saw in the demo.

And if you lost it anyway, enhanced conversions for leads can match on a hashed email or phone. It has a shorter window (63 days versus 90 for a GCLID upload), but it's a second chance, and many accounts run both so that a lost GCLID stops being a lost sale.

If you're choosing how to capture the click ID, here's how I'd rank the options by what they survive.

A hidden field survives nothing except the form it's on. A cookie survives page changes, but not Safari's 7-day cap or a cleared browser. Saving the click ID to the lead record at submit survives everything that happens after the submit, but only if the ID was still around when the form was sent. Capturing it on your own domain the moment the visitor lands survives the longest, because it doesn't depend on the form at all.

In practice the strongest setups stack two of them: capture on landing, and save to the record at submit. Then either can fail and the sale still has a click ID attached. Redundancy is boring, and it's the whole trick.

How are you capturing yours? Especially interested in what you did about embedded forms.

For reference, DataCops keeps the ad click on your own domain for up to 90 days, so the click ID doesn't depend on a hidden field that a redesign can delete.