A 120-Day Sales Cycle. Google's 90-Day Window. The Last Month of Every Closed Deal Was Invisible.

The situation

A German industrial machinery company was spending €60K/month on Google Ads targeting procurement managers across the DACH region. Their average deal size was €28,000 with a 90–150 day sales cycle. Google Ads showed minimal attributed conversions — only website form inquiries — with no visibility into which campaigns were actually closing deals.

The problem

Google Ads' maximum lookback window for offline conversion attribution is 90 days. For a prospect who clicked an ad in January and signed in April (120 days later), Google had no way to attribute that deal. Additionally, their sales team managed everything in Salesforce with zero connection to Google Ads. Smart Bidding was optimizing on form inquiries alone — which included tire-kickers and competitors — rather than the €28K contracts that actually mattered.

What we did

1. Extended GCLID capture and storage to 180 days — Salesforce now stores the Google click ID at form submission and retains it through the full deal lifecycle
2. Built an automated Salesforce → Google Ads Offline Conversion Import pipeline: when an opportunity reaches Closed Won, a Zapier workflow exports the GCLID and deal revenue for nightly upload
3. Created 3 tiered conversion actions: Qualified Inquiry (€0, observation only), Demo Scheduled (€800 proxy, primary signal), Closed Deal (actual revenue, primary goal)
4. Configured a custom 150-day attribution window in Google Ads using the Import Conversions feature, matching the 90th-percentile sales cycle length

Why it worked

For long sales cycles, form fill attribution is nearly meaningless — it measures curiosity, not buying intent. By passing actual deal revenue back to Google 120+ days after the click, Smart Bidding learned which keywords and audiences generate real contracts. The 3 campaigns that appeared strongest on form fills were not the 3 that closed the most deals.