Case study · Measurement & Data Infrastructure
The ads were driving sales the dashboards never saw.
A B2B SMS communications provider whose customers buy through web platforms, sales agents and automatic top-ups.
The situation
Customers could register and buy SMS credits on several different platforms, or entirely offline through sales agents and automatic top-ups. Tag management was a blend of hard-coded scripts and Google Tag Manager, so data collection was fragmented and inconsistent across the estate.
A large share of buyers were repeat purchasers, but the paid media team could not tell whether ad spend was winning new customers or subsidising purchases existing customers would make anyway. Cookie consent did not fully cover every web entity, leaving compliance exposure, and Consent Mode was not set up to make use of GA4's behavioural modelling.
The assumption
The Google Ads account was judged on the conversions it could see: online registrations and online credit purchases. On that reading, paid search was a modest performer, and the recurring budget conversation kept circling the same idea, that agent sales and top-ups were a separate offline world with no connection to the ads.
What the evidence showed
Offline conversion tracking and the Measurement Protocol tied agent-assisted sales and automatic top-ups back to the campaigns that had started them. With GA4 data flowing into BigQuery, new customers could finally be separated from repeat purchasers. The account was driving revenue the dashboards had never attributed to it, while part of the visible spend was going to repeat purchases that needed no advertising at all. The picture was not wrong at the edges. It was wrong at the centre.
What we did
- i.Rebuilt GA4 with new custom dimensions and more granular event tracking, and consolidated every tag out of hard-coded scripts into Google Tag Manager as the single deployment method.
- ii.Set up offline conversion tracking for Google Ads and enhanced the Measurement Protocol setup with new event parameters and user identifiers, merging agent and top-up sales with digital touchpoints.
- iii.Integrated GA4 with BigQuery to store and analyse the combined dataset at scale.
- iv.Built a Looker Studio dashboard that put the unified picture in front of decision-makers.
- v.Deployed Consent Mode V2 in advanced mode with a Cookiebot consent platform serving region-appropriate banners across every web entity.
Results
The business can now see which campaigns produce new customers, which subsidise repeat purchases, and how much revenue starts online but closes through an agent. Budget decisions run on attributed revenue rather than platform-visible conversions, consent risk is closed, and the measurement stack is consolidated in one place instead of scattered across hard-coded scripts.
The lesson
If the dashboard cannot see offline, it is not measuring the business. It is measuring the website.