Google has released Enhanced Conversions, a new feature that improves attribution and enhances accuracy when measuring campaign performance in Google Ads. We recommend turning this new feature on, start using Enhanced Conversions today! It’s a great way to measure the efficacy of your campaigns, and you’ll get access to more of your data! Enhanced Conversions will help you to identify your best performing keywords, ads, and ad groups within your Google Ads campaigns.
Enhanced Conversions will also enable marketers to continue to have visibility into relevant user data, without sacrificing privacy. This new conversion feature will also make it easier to manage your campaigns. You’ll be able to see conversions from your Google Ads campaigns, even when your customers interact with your ads and visit your website on multiple devices, or when using different email addresses!
Bottom line, this new feature will empower you to be able to accurately track and measure the performance of your advertising campaigns…without sacrificing user privacy. Huge win for everyone!
Why Use Enhanced Conversions for Google Ads?
The world of online privacy is rapidly changing, and many platforms (such as Facebook and Google) are overhauling technical operations in order to remain in compliance with policies like the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). The shift to increased user privacy is proving to be an enormous challenge for companies like Google and Facebook, and it’s trickling down to businesses that advertise as well. The ability to measure and track the performance of your advertising campaigns is becoming increasingly difficult.
As a result, marketers need to get aggressive and stay ahead of the game. And when a new feature is released that improves your ability to track and measure campaign performance…you have to start using it!
The Enhanced Conversions tool is designed to change the way advertisers measure their conversions. You can generate accurate conversion data for your campaign that will be sent to Google when a customer purchases after clicking on your ad, even when users have restricted data sharing enabled.
While it may sound nefarious, it’s compliant and users don’t have to worry about personally identifiable information being exposed. Enhanced Conversions will give your business a single source of truth when it tomes to measuring your campaign data. This means a higher adjustment rate in search engine optimization as well as Google Ads campaigns that are tailored to your audiences.
This tool is utilized by businesses to attribute what was successful, in order to improve future campaign effectiveness. It does this by pairing hashed data with signed-in Google accounts to attribute your campaign, using data from clicks or views on ads to give more details about pivotal events that occurred within your ads. Utilizing Enhanced Conversions, Google receives customer data when they complete a conversion on your website, including first-party customer data. This data is then sent to Google in hashed form using an industry-standard hashing algorithm, SHA 256.
Enhanced Conversions uses two significant features to measure conversions accurately, hashed first-party data and robust tagging. The latter uses Gtag.js and Google Tag Manager to measure conversions while cookies are active on your domain. These two features allow Enhanced Conversion to enable conversion measurements that are more accurate and increase conversion rates across channels like Search and YouTube using signed-in user data.
Installing Enhanced Conversions is the first recommended step to ensure measurement visibility in all browsers. Using hashed, first-party data, your tags will be able to identify successful ads that led to sales, allowing you to increase conversion accuracy even further. Data will be automatically hashed and sent to Google Ads in a secure and privacy-safe way. This feature is still in beta, but it is in line with GDPR in the EU.
Recent changes impacting browsers, such as increased security from recent digital changes like Apple’s iOS 15 had a negative impact on advertisers. But there are ways to respect both privacy and security while still utilizing relevant first-party user data. This is where Enhanced Conversion comes into play.
The standard conversion path used to be a customer would be assigned a click ID, purchase on your site, click ID from the conversions get matched with the click ID from the Google ad, and the conversion is reported. Now the process is a little different; the click ID cannot always be appended to the cookie on your site. When a purchase is made on a website with Enhanced Conversion, it anonymizes a user’s email address and securely matches this data against anonymous Google login data to report conversions.
How do Enhanced Conversions work?
Google’s Enhanced Conversion feature is currently in beta, and it allows first-party data to be captured from your website visitors. This means that Google Ads can consume customer data from conversion actions, then match this data back to ads that were viewed on other devices.
Here’s an example of how Enhanced Conversions work:
- Amy uses her desktop computer at work, which is logged into Google with a company email address.
- Amy uses Google to research a new jacket. She clicks an ad for an online store that sells a jacket, but she doesn’t purchase.
- Later on, she uses her mobile phone to visit the same online store. She goes directly to the store’s website address, not through Google.
- But this time Amy is logged into her personal gmail account, not her work email.
- She makes the purchase from her mobile phone, using a different email address than when she originally clicked on the Google search ad.
- During this transaction, key moments are tracked using Enhanced Conversions.
- Amy inputs first-party data, like her shipping address, email, and phone number to purchase; this data is then encrypted and sent to Google.
- Even though this transaction started on a company email, her use of 2-factor authentication allows Google to connect this purchase from Amy’s phone with her work email and creates a complete picture of Amy as a consumer only using her first-party data.
Without Enhanced Conversions, Amy’s purchase might not be attributed back to the Google ad she clicked on at work. However, enabling Enhanced Conversions, Amy’s first-party information like phone numbers and home addresses are shared back to Google Ads so that the data can be matched with conversion actions, effectively attributing her purchase to the clothing shop’s campaign.
Enhanced Conversions help businesses find accurate data by being compatible with DDA or non-last click attribution. This feature can incrementally be integrated with products like Conversion Lift for Youtube to allow organizations even more ways to gain accurate data. If an advertiser activates Enhanced Conversions and runs Conversion Lift for Youtube, marketers will be allowed to use the conversions in the lift measurement. This provides benefits such as more representative samples across all browsers and more data, leading to an increased chance for statistical significance. Enhanced Conversions do not report on the regular conversions being captured daily; instead, Google aims to provide the most factual conversion data possible.
Typically deep conversions such as purchases, leads, and signups with customer data are attached to conversion on the page or subsequent pages to work best with Enhanced Conversions. Using this formula to associate customer data obtained from more shallow conversions like page views may be challenging. After successfully implementing the feature, data will need to be monitored until it reaches the front end. For Search, this is a 60 day monitoring period and a 30 day monitoring time for YouTube. Data from Enhanced Conversions will be funneled automatically into your account.
Even though this tool helps businesses with their conversion data, Google has taken necessary measures to ensure a secure process. User data is encrypted with the SHA 256 algorithm before being sent to Google servers, and this conversion tag only works on a secure HTTP connection. These log files are used to enhance conversion data and are stored separately to ensure an even greater level of security. Google makes additional data checks to ensure that only hashed data reaches Google’s servers.
Enhanced Conversions is a fantastic new feature for Google Ads. If you want the ability to track conversions from your Google campaigns, even when your customers are changing devices and using different email addresses, then you need to turn this feature on ASAP!
Enhanced Conversions enable businesses to gain visibility into who their customers are, while also also gathering more data that can be used by Google’s algorithms in order to increase the effectiveness of your ppc advertising. Marketers and advertisers alike need to stay up-to-date with these changes because it will help them find better ways to increase ROI while still remaining compliant with user privacy policies.
Contact Fetch & Funnel today if you need help with your ppc advertising on Google Ads!
