MasVirtual Lead Tracking

Google Ads can optimise for what you report to it, and nothing more. If all you report is button clicks, that is what it buys you: clicks. The sale that closed three weeks later, on WhatsApp, by a phone call your CRM never saw, is invisible to the bidding algorithm.

MasVirtual Lead Tracking closes that loop. It records where every visitor came from, keeps that origin attached to the lead through your sales funnel, and reports back to Google Ads at each stage — in the browser for the contact itself, and by offline conversion import for the qualified lead and the closed sale, which happen weeks later when nobody is on the page anymore.

The WhatsApp button is part of it because that is where these conversations start, and because a click that is not measured cannot be attributed. But the button is the input, not the point: the point is that “campaign arl-transporte produced 3 sales worth 9,600,000” becomes a sentence you can read, and that Google Ads can bid on.

What this version does

• Captures ad click identifiers (Google, Meta, Microsoft, TikTok), UTM parameters and the referrer for every visitor, not just paid ones.
• Stores first touch and last touch separately, because they rarely match.
• Renders the floating button, with configurable icon, size, color, shape, position and business hours.
• Measures clicks on any WhatsApp link on the page, including the ones added by your theme, an Elementor button or another plugin, and the ones that appear after the page loads.
• Routes the click across several recipients, by rotation, by weight or by schedule, and can create the lead already assigned to a sales rep.
• Different messages per page, per content type or per traffic source: you can greet someone who arrived from an ad differently.
• [mvlt_whatsapp] shortcode and a Gutenberg block.
• Configurable retention with automatic purging, wired into the WordPress privacy tools.
• Reports conversions to Google Ads: in the browser with gtag for what happens on the page, and through CSV import for what happens weeks later, when a sales rep marks the sale as won.
• A diagnostics screen that answers “is this working?” without opening the console, with every warning explained and a button to simulate an event.

What it does not do yet

The drag-and-drop lead board with columns, and outgoing webhooks to n8n or a CRM, are coming in the next release. Leads are already stored in full: nothing captured today is lost when those arrive.

About the reference in the message

MasVirtual Lead Tracking appends a short reference to the prefilled message, like Ref: [#K7M2QF83]. That is what lets you match the message arriving in WhatsApp with the campaign that produced it.

Know this before you trust the number: between 15% and 30% of users delete the prefilled text before sending. Those leads cannot be matched. That is a WhatsApp limitation, not a plugin one, and the only real mitigation is to push a form as the primary channel when exact attribution matters.

You can also place the reference mid-message using the {ref} placeholder, which survives partial deletion better than a trailing line does.

Privacy

Click identifiers are personal data under the GDPR in Europe, and under Law 1581 of 2012 in Colombia. Storing them makes the site operator a data controller.

Add a paragraph to your privacy policy along these lines:

When you visit this site we store, for up to 90 days, the advertising identifier that came with your visit (for example the Google Ads one), the campaign parameters in the URL, the address of the page you arrived from, and a random identifier for your browser. We do this to know which campaigns generate real enquiries. If you contact us on WhatsApp, we associate that data with your message. You may request access to or deletion of this information by writing to [your contact address].

The plugin reads the Google Consent Mode v2 state and acts accordingly: without consent it writes no first-party cookie and keeps only the identifiers that do not depend on cookies.

What it stores in the browser, with consent, is this and nothing else:

• wl_v — a first-party cookie holding a random browser identifier. The server writes it, it is HttpOnly and SameSite=Lax, and it expires after the number of days set as the attribution window. No script reads it, neither this plugin nor any other on the page.
• wl_f, wl_l, wl_uid, wl_turno, wl_vp — in localStorage. These are not cookies and travel in no request: first touch, last touch, the lead reference, the assigned sales rep, and the browser-proposed visitor identifier used only until the server issues the wl_v cookie. The proposed value is deliberately named differently from the cookie, because they are two separate things.

There are no third-party cookies and no identifiers shared with anyone.

Conversion feed (optional, disabled by default). If you enable it, the plugin publishes a URL with a random 48-character key so that Google Ads can collect conversions on its own schedule. That URL serves a CSV containing Google click identifiers, sale values and conversion action names, and it is readable by anyone who knows it: Google cannot authenticate against WordPress. It contains no names, phone numbers or email addresses. The key can be rotated at any time, which invalidates the previous URL immediately.

External services

The plugin works without contacting any server of ours: it sends no telemetry, phones nobody home, and requires no account or key. Everything it captures stays in the site’s own database.

Two third-party services are involved, both by explicit decision of the administrator:

Google tag (gtag.js). Only if you tick “let MasVirtual Lead Tracking load the Google tag” under Conversions, which ships disabled. It loads https://www.googletagmanager.com/gtag/js and sends Google Ads the conversion event with the identifier, label, value and currency you configured, plus the click identifier Google placed in the URL. If your site already loads the tag through Site Kit, GTM or a theme snippet, the plugin detects it and does not duplicate it. Google terms and privacy: https://policies.google.com/terms · https://policies.google.com/privacy

WhatsApp. The button and the links in your content point to https://wa.me, the official WhatsApp redirector. Nothing is sent to Meta from the server: it is the visitor who navigates there on tap, with the number and message in the URL, exactly as with any WhatsApp link. WhatsApp terms and privacy: https://www.whatsapp.com/legal/terms-of-service · https://www.whatsapp.com/legal/privacy-policy

About imported conversions

Conversions that happen after the visit — a qualified lead, a closed sale — cannot be reported from the browser, because the visitor is no longer there. They accumulate and are uploaded to Google Ads by file.

Every row carries the event time with the site’s UTC offset stated explicitly, and an order identifier derived from the lead reference. That identifier is what lets you upload the same file twice without duplicating conversions.

Before writing each row the plugin validates that the conversion is later than the click, that no more than 90 days have passed, and that the identifier is of a type Google accepts through this route. Rows that fail are shown on screen with the reason, never dropped silently: a conversion that disappears without explanation is worse than an error, because the team believes it was reported.

Rows whose problem can never be fixed — a lead that arrived through an unpaid channel, a gbraid/wbraid identifier, a conversion already past the 90-day window — are discarded with their reason recorded in the lead’s history, so the “pending” counter only ever shows work that still exists. Rows you can still fix, such as an action missing its Google Ads name, stay pending on purpose.

To automate the upload without a file, GET /wp-json/mvlt/v1/pendientes returns already-validated conversions and POST /wp-json/mvlt/v1/exportados confirms the uploads. That is the recommended route with n8n: the Google Ads API PHP library is heavy and demands OAuth, and it is not worth it below roughly 200 conversions a month.