Among marketers, it has been known for some time that privacy measures regarding personal data and the widespread effort to eliminate third-party cookies have increased the difficulty of tracking and targeting consumers through the Google Ads advertising system across various devices. Each marketing agency should.
This long-standing change has resulted in reduced advertising effectiveness. Various solutions have emerged through available platforms with their own methods to address this issue. However, in the following article, we will describe how to set up your Google Ads campaigns as quickly as possible and without unnecessary complex scripts to increase the effectiveness of conversion tracking. How to do it? With the help of so-called enhanced conversions.
What are enhanced conversions?
When a customer or visitor completes a conversion on the client's website, you can obtain customer data (known as first-party customer data), such as email address, name, home address, and/or phone number. These mentioned data can be captured in your conversion tracking "tags," secured by a one-way algorithm (protected from disclosure), and sent to Google in their "hashed form" for use in improving conversion measurement.
Depending on the type of enhanced conversions you use, the "hashed" data will be used in various ways to enhance your measurement:
Enhanced conversions for web
Suitable for advertisers who mainly want to track sales events happening on websites.
Improves the measurement of online conversions.
Allows sending hashed data provided by users from your website when a user completes a conversion. The data is then used to match your customers to Google accounts they were signed into when interacting with any of your ads.
Enhanced conversions for leads
Suitable for advertisers who want to track sales made from websites (for example, through phone or email) and thus leads from websites.
Improves the measurement of offline transactions that came from a potential customer or website visitor.
Allows you to use hashed data provided by first-party users from lead forms on your website for offline measurement of potential customers. When you upload potential customers, the provided hashed information is used to attribute back to the Google ad campaign.
1. Enabling enhanced conversions in Google Ads
This step assumes that you have set up a purchase conversion in the Google Ads advertising system using Google Ads conversion tracking. It includes both the Conversion ID and Conversion label.
Enabling enhanced conversions is done within the settings of a specific conversion, in our case - Purchase, within the Google Ads interface.
As the last image also suggests, we need to take further steps in the settings within the Google Tag Manager interface.
2. Setting up enhanced conversions in Google Tag Manager
In our guide, we won't go into detail regarding the setup of the actual "Purchase" tag in the Google Tag Manager interface. We will simply locate the "Purchase" tag itself and check the option "Include user-provided data from your website" in its settings.
3. User-Provided Data
In the "Select user-provided data variable" section, we will choose the option "New Variable" from the drop-down menu. Subsequently, a window with the variable type "User-Provided Data" will open, where we will select the option "Automatic collection".
We must not forget to publish all the aforementioned changes to the created container by pressing the "Submit" button and then "Publish" to deploy the changes to the Google Tag Manager code placed on the client's website.
Setting for leads
The setup process for leads, including the configuration of enhanced conversions for contact forms, is identical. The difference lies in having a created tag of type "Google Ads Conversion Tracking" in the Google Tag Manager interface. In the second step, you will similarly select the option "Include user-provided data from your website".
About the Quick Guide to Conversion Setup
This guide presents the fastest implementation of enhanced conversions through the "Automatic collection" option. This method allows the tag to automatically detect user-provided data on the website. It's the quickest and simplest way to set up, although it's not as reliable as choosing "Manual configuration", where you add code snippets to your website or input CSS selectors or JavaScript variables.
With manual setup, you precisely define the input fields of a specific form you choose for each data layer - "Data Layer Variable." This requires knowledge of JavaScript or CSS selectors.
If you're unsure about correctly setting up measured conversions on your corporate website, or if you're running Google Ads campaigns and need to enhance your measured conversions or activate enhanced conversions, feel free to contact us. We're happy to assist with the overall configuration.
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