Learn about Google’s Enhanced Conversions feature, how it works, and the value it can deliver to your marketing efforts.
Have growing privacy concerns — and related changes to lead tracking — negatively impacted your marketing efforts?
It has for many businesses.
The good news is that Google has a feature in place to counter the diminishment of cookies and other standard tracking methods: Google Ads Enhanced Conversions.
This guide explains the Enhanced Conversions feature, how it works, and the value it can deliver to your marketing efforts.
Enhanced Conversions collects hashed, first-party data from your website after a conversion action takes place. The anonymous user information is used to attribute conversions to your paid ads.
Enhanced Conversions not only provides attribution to paid ads. It also captures what occurs prior to the final conversion action. Google does this by using its own, first-party data.
When customer data from your website is gathered and hashed and sent to Google, Google matches it with accounts on the platform. Every time a user of a Google product, like Chrome or Gmail, or when they sign in to other services through their Google username and passwords, Google uses the information it gathers to support Enhanced Conversion reporting.
Be aware: If you have privacy concerns, they are unfounded. Advertisers on Google do not have access to personal data. That’s because of the one-way encryption practice of hashing data. The only times it’s worth digging deeper into whether to take advantage of Enhanced Conversions are when you ask for personally identifiable information as part of your marketing or are promoting a medical practice where you collect sensitive healthcare information. The experts at Jarrah can help you through any concerns.
Here are some of the benefits of Enhanced Conversions:
With Enhanced Conversions, you collect more, better, and more valuable data. When Google connects your data with information about logged-in users, advertisers receive a complete picture of user engagement. With a foundation based in data-driven attribution (DDA), Enhanced Conversions can identify more individual actions across the consumer journey.
More data doesn’t just help advertisers on Google; it also expands and improves its algorithm. With access to additional accurate data points, the bidding algorithm becomes smarter and more powerful. This will result in more efficient bids, which in turn will result in additional conversions and higher revenue.
Through Google Enhanced Conversions, you have more data about the characteristics of your best converting leads. This allows you to focus more on people that share them and less on lower-quality leads, wasting less time and money on them. It can also help you identify emerging audience segments you might want to increase your spend on.
Enhanced Conversions is particularly powerful for online retailers and others that complete transactions on their websites. It can extract the exact order value from a checkout or order confirmation page and use that to measure results within Google Ads. This helps identify your highest-value customers so you can find more people like them.
Start setting up Google Enhanced Conversions by determining which type you want to use. There are two:
The key difference is that the web version will improve the measurement of online conversions, while the lead version is better for tracking offline transactions made through things like phone calls or emails. If you choose Enhanced Conversions for Leads, you will need to set up Enhanced Conversions for Web first.
There are three routes you can take to launch Enhanced Conversions:
Google Tag Manager is typically the easiest and most effective way to get started using Enhanced Conversions. In Google Tag Manager, ensure both the Google Tag and Google Ads Conversion Tags are set up and implemented within the account.
Here are the steps you must take to set up Enhanced Conversions using Google Tag Manager,
Navigate to the Conversions window, and select the conversion type you want to use, checking the box in the dropdown for “Enhanced Conversions.” You then need to choose how to complete the setup. In this case, select “Google Tag Manager.”
Navigate to Google Tag Manager and create a new tag. Then, search for a configuration called “Google Ads User-provided Data Event.”
Once you select “New Variable”, choose “Automic Collection” and hit save.
Set up two triggers:
The Diagnostic tab can be found by clicking on the conversion of choice within Google Ads. It can take 48 hours or more to check that your setup works. If it doesn’t, you can set up Enhanced Conversions manually. If you run into issues, the professionals at Jarrah are available to support you.
Google will confirm that your set up is working and the improvement in your match rate. Again, the team at Jarrah can help if you run into issues.
Once set up, using Enhanced Conversions is relatively easy. (Again, the experts at Jarrah can help.)
You can expect it to deliver many more accurate data points, which can improve bidding and targeting strategies in Google Ads. At a time when people are concerned about privacy and cookie use is limited, Enhanced Conversions are increasingly becoming a critical component of successful marketing programs. Don’t wait to leverage it to stay competitive and increase all sorts of conversions, including sales.
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