Implementing Enhanced Conversions

‍

ENHANCED CONVERSIONS

‍

IMPLEMENTING ENHANCED CONVERSION TRACKING

‍

Background

The advent of several novel legal data protection legislation frameworks (GDPR, DPA (UK), CCPA, etc.), as well as new privacy and PII tracking enforcement measures from companies such as Mozilla (Firefox ETP) and Apple (Safari ITP), are making it increasingly difficult to track and target consumers across devices. 

This has made it much more difficult to effectively measure, report and attribute ad performance, since conversions are being vastly underreported.

Enhanced Conversion tracking uses first-party customer data from advertisers, ecommerce merchants and marketers, as well as Google's own hashed data on signed in users, to track user events across devices. Enhanced Conversions allows Google Ads to ingest customer data from a conversion action and then match that data back to ads viewed through other devices.

‍

This article provides a brief summary of : 

• What enhanced Conversions are and how they work
• The benefits of Enhanced Conversions
• Methods for implementing Enhanced Conversions

‍

What are Enhanced Conversions

‍
Enhanced conversions supplements your existing conversion tags by sending hashed first party conversion data from your website to Google in a privacy safe way (a one-way secure hash). It allows marketers to send an SHA256 hash on their first party customer data, such as email addresses, phone numbers and addresses, before sending to Google. 

The hashed data (emails, phone numbers, etc.) are compared with signed-in Google accounts for attribution of conversion events (e.g. clicks, views).

‍Enhanced Conversions uses the following key user identifiers - which are subsequently hashed using the SHA-256 one-way-hash, and sent as first-party customer data in the form of conversion adjustments.

Enhancements support the following identifiers:

• Standardized and normalized Email addresses <hashed_email>
• Format phone numbers according to the ITU E.164 standard <hashed_phone_number>
• Address information <address_info>

‍

The key user identifiers can be sent to Google in order for Google to match it with its datasets of signed-in users - hence improving attribution. Google uses this additional data to improve the reporting of your online conversions driven by ad interactions.

This collection and matching pipeline is illustrated in the diagram below:

‍

ENHANCED CONVERSION TRACKING PIPELINE:

‍

Stage 1

Google signed-in user views your Youtube ad.

The user converts on your website.

The conversion tag captures a field you determined (e.g. email), hashes the data and securely sends it to Google.

The hashed data is matched against Google hashed user data and a conversion is reported in your account.

Image source 

‍

The Benefits of Enhanced Conversions

‍

In Google’s words, enhanced conversions, “preserve conversion measurement with enhanced conversions Browsers are restricting third-party cookies, limiting your ability to measure campaign results. Enhanced conversions helps the Google tag capture more conversion data in a privacy-centric way, improving the accuracy of your clients’ measurement.”

The core benefits for advertisers are:

‍

1. Improved accuracy

By matching hashed user data from first-party data, enhanced conversions manage to capture conversions that may have been missed by cookie-based attribution. This improves the data that Google's algorithm uses for bid optimization on automated bid strategies, allowing advertisers to make the most out of their spend.

2. Privacy

The one-way hashing preserves privacy for consumers by anonymizing data before sending it to Google and complying with GDPR and CCPA.

3. Offline Conversion Tracking (Enhanced Conversions for Leads)

Enhanced Conversions is a prerequisite for utilizing the Offline Conversions matching currently, rather confusingly called "Enhanced Conversions for Leads." This process allows advertisers to send data back to Google offline and match using the hashed emails rather than relying on Google Click IDs.

‍

Implementing Enhanced Conversions

‍

Method 1: Use the global site tag for Google Ads conversion tracking:

This method is well documented on the following Google Ads support website.

Enhanced Conversions implementation using the global site tag is neither the preferred, nor most effective way of implementing enhanced conversions and so we recommend advertisers to focus on implementing via the Google Tag Manager

Method 2: Set up enhanced conversions manually with Google Tag Manager

‍

Stage 1: Prerequisites Checklist:

• Ensure that you have reviewed Google's Customer data policies, that pertains to Google's policies concerning the collection of customer information.

• Ensure you have Google Ads conversion tracking setup  using Google Tag Manager.

• Know the conversion page URL where the conversion tag fires (e.g. the confirmation page URL) and the conversion event trigger (for example, a button click or a page view).

• Make sure there is first party customer data available (email, full name and home address, and/or phone number) on the page where your conversion tracking tag fires.

‍

Note:

At least one of the following variables must be provided:

• Email (preferred)
• Full name and address (first name, last name, street address, city, region, postal code, country all required)
• A phone number formatted according to the ITU E.164 standard can also be provided along with an email, or full name and address.

‍

Stage 2: Turn on Enhanced Conversions in Google Ads:

1. Sign in to your Google Ads account.
2. In the upper right corner of your account, click the tools icon

1. and under "Measurement," click Conversions.
2. Open the conversion action you want to use for setting up enhanced conversions.
3. In the “Enhanced conversions” section at the bottom, click Turn on enhanced conversions.
4. Click Agree to the compliance statement. The Google Ads Data Processing terms apply to enhanced conversion tracking - these are Standard Contractual Clauses for Data Processors issued by the European Commission.
5. Click Check URL to check your website for a Google tag.
6. In “Tag type” you should be defaulted to Google Tag Manager if that is how you track conversions for this conversion action. Because you used Google Tag Manager to set up website tags, you need to use it to set up enhanced conversions. Follow the instructions below to set up enhanced conversions manually with Google Tag Manager.
7. Click Save.

Note: This method does not support conversions measured by importing Google Analytics goals.

‍

Stage 3: Set Up Conversion Linker Tag in GTM (if you already have move to step 4):

• Open your Google Tag Manager container.
• Click on "Tags" in the workspace menu and choose "New."
• Select "Conversion Linker" from the tag configuration options.
• Choose a trigger (usually a "All Pages Viewed" trigger or a specific pageview trigger where conversions happen).
• Save the tag configuration and publish your container.

Stage 4: Capture User Provided Data

• You will either need to ask your developer to send the unhashed email to the Data Layer or inspect the conversion confirmation page and capture the email using javascript
  

• 
  This is an example of the code your developer would implement on your website
  window.dataLayer = window.dataLayer || [];

      window.dataLayer.push({

        event: "form_submit",

        email: email,

        first_name: first_name,

        last_name: last_name,

        phone_number: phone_number,

       });

• Create a User Provided Data tag
  
  

Next, we’ll need to create a dataLayer variable. Navigate to “Variables” and click “New.

‍

Select “Data Layer Variable”.

‍

Input the variable name passed to the data layer by your developer. In this case it is “email”. Then click “Save”.

Next, we’ll create a User-Provided Data variable.

Select “Manual configuration” and enter the data layer variable we created in an earlier step.

• Create or update the existing conversion tag that will be using Enhanced Conversions in order to accept User Provided Data
  
  

Next, we need to create the Google Ads Conversion tag. Navigate to “Tags” and click “New”.

‍

Select “Google Ads”.

‍

Then, select “Google Ads Conversion Tracking”.

Now, we’ll need to switch gears to Google Ads to grab some information. Go to your Google Ads account and navigate to “Goals” > “Summary”. Then, click on “New conversion action” if you don’t already have one.

‍

Select the option appropriate for your conversion tracking. In this case we will use the popular use case of tracking conversion on your website.

This is an example of what your conversion action configuration may look like. Configure these settings to your use case and then click “Done”.

‍

Head back to the conversion goals summary and click on your conversion action.

Here, you’ll be able to get your “Conversion ID” and “Conversion label”. You’ll need to copy these two values into your Google Ads Conversion tag in Google Tag Manager.

‍

While you are still in the conversion goal settings you should also check that “Enhanced conversions is on. Make sure the  “Use enhanced conversions for this conversion action” checkbox is ticked.

Back in Google Tag manager enter the “Conversion ID” and “Conversion label” that you copied from Google Ads.

Next, tick the checkbox that says “Include user-provided data from your website” and select the User-Provided Data variable we created early. In this case it is called “UPD”.

Make sure to create a trigger for your tag. Since we are tracking a sign up form submission we created a “form_submit” trigger.

Don’t forget to add the “Conversion Linker”. This is vital for tracking your conversions properly in Google Ads.

Trigger the conversion linker on “All Pages”.

‍

Testing

‍

Open the GTM Preview on both the web.. Navigate to your website and trigger the conversion you are testing. You should see the UPD data object in the “Data Layer” and “Variables” tabs in the web preview. In the server preview you should see The “Google Ads Conversion Tracking” tag you made.

‍

Finally you’ll need to wait for some Conversions to come through (as far as we know there isn’t a way to test this before receiving real conversions) and in your Conversions Summary page on Google Ads the “Status” for your conversion should say “Active” and if you hover over “Status” you should see A green checkmark next to “Recording conversions” and “Enhanced conversions is active”.

Click “Preview”. 

‍

Enter your website’s URL and click “Connect”. Next, you’ll need to trigger your conversion. In our case we will fill submit our sign up form.

‍

After you’ve triggered your conversion, navigate back to your preview mode tab and look for your conversion event on the left side of the window. In our case we see the “form_submit” event. You should also see under “Tags” that your Google Ads Conversion Tracking tag has fired successfully. Click on your tag to see more details.

Here you’ll be able to confirm that the tag fired successfully. You’ll as be able to confirm that your enhanced conversions are being passed properly if “Include user-provided data from your website” = true and you can see user data (in this case it’s an email) next to “cssProvidedEnhancedConversionValue”. While you are here you should also confirm that you have the right “Conversion ID” and “Conversion Label”.

If everything has worked properly, you can go back to your Google Ads conversion goals summary and see that your conversions status now reads “No recent conversions” (previously “Inactive”). It may take a few minutes before this status updates in Google Ads.

‍

After you start getting real conversions from customers, your status will update to “active” and if you hover over the text you should see a green checkmark next to “Recording conversions” and “Enhanced conversions is active”.

Congratulations! You’ve successfully implemented conversion tracking for Google Ads! You will now be able to use optimized bidding in Google Ads, as well as metrics to make better decisions about your business. If you require further assistance in setting up tracking for Google Ads conversions, or if you need assistance with any other type of tracking or reporting, you can reach out to us at https://www.jarrah.agency.

‍