Return 
Share 
Enhanced Conversions, Google Ads’ advanced conversion tracking feature, provides a more accurate picture of conversions, even when standard tracking methods fall short. By leveraging first-party user data, such as email addresses or phone numbers, Enhanced Conversions can fill in gaps and restore missing conversions, ensuring a more comprehensive understanding of the marketing efforts.
How Enhanced Conversions Works
- Let’s imagine a user makes a conversion and leaves their contact information (name, email, postal address, or phone number) on your website.
- With Enhanced Conversions, this information is securely hashed and sent to Google Ads servers.
- Contact information is hashed using the secure SHA256 algorithm before being sent to Google, ensuring user privacy.
- Google then matches this hashed data with its own user databases to establish a connection between conversions and advertising events. This process ensures user privacy while providing valuable insights into your marketing campaigns.
This means that Google Ads advertisers see more complete conversion data attributed to their ad campaigns, and Google Ads algorithms have more data to optimize bids effectively. Marketers are happy!
Another scenario for Enhanced Conversions is importing offline conversions based solely on user contact information. Some sales funnels involve offline interactions between the company and the user, such as phone calls, visits to the sales office, or contract signings. Previously, tracking these interactions required saving the gclid advertising identifier in the CRM. However, Enhanced Conversions eliminates this need.
If a user leaves their contact details in a website application form, new conversions can be set up using the same data to track changes in lead status. This simplifies offline conversion tracking, enabling a more accurate measurement of advertising’s impact on business metrics like lead revenue and ROI.
Why Enhanced Conversions Matter
Today, the entire internet industry is actively moving towards increasing user data privacy. Governments and regulators worldwide are tightening data protection laws. Browsers are limiting the use of cookies, the traditional foundation of web analytics.
Google, the owner of the world’s most popular browser, Google Chrome, and the Google Ads advertising system, had initially planned to completely phase out third-party cookies. However, in summer 2024, the company adjusted its plans, allowing users to manage these settings themselves.
Despite this change, the overall trend towards limiting cookie usage persists. Even with these changes, Google aims to preserve essential tools for marketers, ensuring that Google Ads advertisers can still track the effectiveness of their campaigns.
Enhanced Conversions Benefits
If a user’s browser has cookie storage restrictions or the user has opted out of tracking, Google Ads may struggle to accurately determine the traffic source of a conversion. Enhanced Conversions significantly improves the accuracy of conversion tracking in these scenarios.
Benefits of Enhanced Conversions:
- Increased number of conversions attributed to Google Ads;
- Improved performance of automatic Google Ads strategies (more conversion data leads to more accurate targeting and higher conversion rates);
- Ability to track offline conversions without updating form settings.
Should Your Business Use Enhanced Conversions
Enhanced Conversions is the perfect solution for any business that collects customer contact information, such as during registration, order placement, or form submissions.
However, if your website is informational, lacks user accounts, or redirects users directly to a mobile app, Enhanced Conversions may not be applicable.
To note: particularly for health or finance (YMYL) related websites, you should carefully review your privacy policy. While data transfer to Google is encrypted, exercising caution is always advisable.
Enabling Enhanced Conversions
There are several methods for enabling Enhanced Conversions:
- Google Tag: Automatically collects necessary data.
- Google Tag Manager: Provides granular control over data collection.
- Google Ads API: Allows for importing offline conversions.
Automatic data collection via Google Tag is the simplest approach. However, for granular control over data collection, including conversions from users who are already logged in, Google Tag Manager is recommended. To maximize control and account for complex user journeys, consulting with specialists is advisable.
To check your current settings, navigate to Goals > Conversions > Settings in your Google Ads account. You’ll find two Enhanced Conversions options:
- Enhanced conversions for leads: For importing offline conversions;
- Enhanced conversions: For improving the accuracy of online conversions.
When creating or editing a Google Ads conversion, check the “Enhanced Conversions” box to enable automatic data collection or manual data import via Google Tag Manager.
If your goal is to improve conversion tracking accuracy, enabling automatic data collection is sufficient. For importing offline conversions, you’ll need to set up data import via Google Ads API or by integrating with a CRM system.
An important point to consider: when collecting data from a website, Google Ads automatically hashes the values before sending them. If you want to connect offline conversions, it’s recommended to hash the data on your side to ensure consistency.
Data Normalization Steps:
- Remove spaces from values.
- Convert email text to lowercase.
- Format phone numbers according to the E.164 standard.
Example:
Email: jdoe@example.com
Phone: +1234567890
How quickly does Enhanced Conversions produce results?
Today, Enhanced Conversions can take up to 30 days to fully learn and optimize after setup. During this period, conversion tracking will function as usual.
Once Enhanced Conversions is fully active, you’ll see the status “Enhanced Conversions is active” when hovering over the conversion’s status in the Goals > Conversions > Summary section.
If you go to conversion diagnostics, you’ll see Coverage and Impact indicators, which show the accuracy of your settings and the impact on conversion numbers.
To evaluate the effectiveness of Enhanced Conversions, we set up two versions of the same conversion: one with Enhanced Conversions enabled and one without.
In accounts with a small number of leads, we didn’t observe a significant difference in conversion numbers. However, on an e-commerce project with a substantial number of conversions, we saw a roughly 7% increase in conversions attributed to Enhanced Conversions.
While Enhanced Conversions results may vary from project to project, we recommend using this feature to maximize the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns.
A few words at the end
With growing demands for user data privacy, working with first-party data is becoming increasingly strategic. While Enhanced Conversions may not immediately lead to a dramatic increase in attributed conversions, it provides a valuable tool for filling data gaps and preparing for future changes in the digital advertising landscape.
