How to Capture & Store the Google Click ID for Offline Conversion Tracking

Ensure that you understand the overall process of capturing and using the Google Ads Click ID. First, we’ll get the “gclid” parameter from the URL using ListenLayer. Second, we’ll store the value in the user’s browser (allowing it to persist as they browse the website). Next, we’ll retrieve the gclid value from the cookie or local storage and push it back into the data layer during critical actions. Finally, we’ll capture the gclid in a hidden field during a form submission.

Turn on the URL Parameters Listener so that the GCLID will be parsed and pushed into the data layer automatically. Once it’s in the data layer, we can do anything we want with it inside ListenLayer.

After publishing your Listener, test it on your website to capture a GCLID. You can see in this screenshot the URL parameters are parsed and pushed into the data layer (which is written to the console).

Under Browser Storage Variables, create a new cookie or local storage key that you will use to save the gclid. We cannot simply capture it from the URL and use it, rather we must store it in the browser so that it will persist across pages and sessions from the user.

In the following step we will write a rule to actually save the gclid value into the browser based on a data layer rule.

ListenLayer uses the data layer to trigger rules you write inside of the platform. Now that we have a cookie or local storage key to save the GCLID into, we need to write the rule that will trigger this action. In this image, you’ll see a simple condition that requires the URL parameters data layer event and the existence of a GCLID. In the following step, we’ll store the GCLID if this condition rule is met.

When the condition we wrote in the previous step is met, we’ll store the GCLID into the cookie or browser storage key we created. This is done by simply selecting the data layer variable and inserting it to the rule.

After publishing your changes, we recommend testing to ensure that the GCLID is actually being stored. Visit your website with the ?gclid=1234 parameter on your URL. Then “Inspect Element,” navigate to Application and find your key.

Consider the critical actions when you’ll want GCLID to be captured with other data. Now that GCLID exists in browser storage, we can easily push it back into the data layer as users interact with our website (always us the data layer, it creates consistency and allows for monitoring). In this case we are going to push GCLID back into the data layer every time a form loads or is submitted on our website. You can use chat, eCommerce, or other critical actions as well.

When our critical actions occur, we will simply push the GCLID back into the data layer. Here you can see we have a custom data layer variable called user_gclid (we created this inside of ListenLayer) and we are going to push the gclid from the browser storage into this when our rules are met from the previous step.

Once the gclid is back in the data layer, we recommend capturing it with other data such as custom GA4 events. You can also move to the next step and see how to capture it via hidden fields into your CRM.

Create a hidden field on all of your forms – you will use it capture the gclid. ListenLayer will push the Google Ads Click ID into this field based on rules you create and manage in the platform.

Pro Tip: You can write a monitoring rule inside ListenLayer to identify any forms on your website that are missing the hidden field!

Create a unique CSS class for your hidden field. You don’t need to have actual styles for this class, the class is used to identify the field across forms, which is not always required. Some forms systems generate unique fields for each form, making it hard to globally identify a single hidden field unless we unify the with a common identifier.

Here we are putting the string “user_GCLID” into the class field. In the next step we will write a rule to always push the GCLID into any field with this class.

Inside of ListenLayer, we can create a rule to populate hidden fields on any form of our website. We’ll write the rule to push the gclid from browser storage into the hidden field based on the css class we created in the previous step. ListenLayer will find any “” element (field) that exists inside an HTML node containing this class.