Accurate conversion tracking is vital for any business to strategically increase the ROAS. While running ads, one of the most common challenges is the likelihood of mismatched conversions, which affects your ability to take data-driven decisions. To address these challenges with accurate conversion tracking, Google has introduced Enhanced Conversions for Web to improve your attribution accuracy with precision. With this advanced feature, the accuracy of conversions can be elevated, benefiting the marketers to enable their first-party data and improve the accuracy of conversion measurement.
In this blog, you will learn:
- What is Enhanced Conversions for Web?
- How do enhanced conversions for web and leads differ from each other?
- How do Enhanced Conversions augment first-party data?
- What are the long-term effects that it would have on the campaigns?
No time to waste; let’s get started with exploring this powerful solution to ace your conversion tracking accuracy.
What is Enhanced Conversions for Web?
Enhanced Conversions (EC) for Web utilize first-party data to send digital identifiers that match users with Google’s logged-in user data, enabling precise conversion reporting. This process involves capturing hashed customer data from conversion pages and matching it against Google’s database.
How do Enhanced Conversions for Web Work?
When a user ends up converting on the website. How do enhanced conversions track the user accurately? For your better understanding, we have split the entire working mechanism into tiny bits.
Let’s understand what exactly happens when you implement enhanced conversions for web with a small scenario.
Imagine Adam is a Shopify store owner who runs campaigns on Google Ads to drive purchases for his store. A user, let’s name her Naomi, clicks on the ad on Youtube while signed in and lands on the website. Naomi makes the purchase, and the conversion gets attributed. This is the picture that you see on the front end when a user gets converted.
What actually happens in the backend when a user performs the conversion action?
When the conversion action—in this instance, the purchase—is made, a tag on your website is set to send the conversions to Google Ads whenever a purchase takes place. This tag sends conversion with order ID to Google Ads.
A separate system, the API, will look for details about Naomi in your data sources. The API integration collects the user data, normalizes, and hashes user first-party data and the order ID before sending it to the Google Ads API.
The hashed first-party data is matched against the Google logged-in user data, and conversion is reported on your account.
Do you know: Enhanced conversions have proven to boost performance, with a 5% lift in search conversions and a 17% lift in YouTube conversions.
By now, you might have a clear understanding of how enhanced conversions for web work. Make sure to not get confused with enhanced conversions for leads. To eliminate the chaos, let’s differentiate how enhanced conversions for web and lead differ from each other.
Highlighting the differences: Enhanced conversions for web vs lead
The differences are listed in the table below.
| Enhanced conversions for Web | Enhanced conversions for Leads |
| Tracks online conversions like purchases and sign-ups on your website | Tracks offline conversions by linking online ad interactions to offline lead data |
| Collects data directly from the website, such as customer email addresses, phone numbers, or other identifiers provided during the conversion process. | Collects data from your CRM or other lead management tools where customer information (provided offline) is stored after a lead fills out a form or interacts with your business. |
| Hashes customer data (e.g., SHA256) directly on the browser before sending it to Google. Supports compliance with privacy standards like GDPR and CCPA. | It requires you to hash customer data before uploading it to Google Ads. Matches uploaded data with Google users securely and privately. |
| Provides real-time insights into online conversion performance, improving optimization for bidding strategies like Target ROAS or maximize Conversions. | Offers delayed insights because offline conversion data must be processed and matched manually or through automated uploads. |
| Enhances online ad attribution by reducing conversion tracking discrepancies caused by cookie restrictions or tracking blockers. | Enhances cross-channel attribution by connecting online ad interactions to offline outcomes. |
| Integrated with website platforms like Google Tag Manager | Requires integration with your CRM or offline data source. |
| Ideal for e-commerce and businesses with direct online transactions. | Best for lead generation businesses where conversions often happen offline. |
Understanding the difference would have provided you some clarity on how Enhanced conversions for web and Enhanced conversions for leads is different from each other. Let’s get started with the implementation steps.
How to Implement Enhanced Conversions for Web
Follow these steps for successful implementation:
- Create a conversion action in your Google Ads account
- Enter your website and manually setup the conversion action.
- Once that’s done. Enable Enhanced Conversions for web in Google Ads and save the changes.
- Exclude specific conversion actions for accurate conversion tracking.
Now you are set. To know a more detailed step-by-step setup guide for enhanced conversions for web, check out this blog: How to Implement Enhanced Conversions for Web in Google Ads
If you have already enabled enhanced conversions, you can see the effectiveness of the setup and the quality of the data signals sent through enhanced conversions for web by checking the diagnostics of enhanced conversion scored in Google Ads.
With the successful setup, you will be able to see what conversions are tracked, their data source and when the most recent update took place.
Not just that, you will also be able to see the visual representation of the quality of your offline conversions that has been reflected in your Google Ads account.
Additionally, the historical data of the successful events is being imported to Google Ads, and events are reported with errors.
With these data, you will be able to track whether the setup is working properly or whether it needs a fix.
Moving forward, let’s understand how advertisers like you can benefit by setting up enhanced conversions for web by cracking the code on how enhanced conversions for web augment your first-party data (1PD).
How Enhanced Conversions for Web Augments 1P Data
Enhanced conversion for Web enriches ad campaigns with enormous and quality first-party data collected directly from the users. And there are multiple ways where implementing enhanced conversions can improve the overall campaign performance. Below are the potential ways enhanced conversions for web can improve your business.
Improved Data Collection:
Enhanced Conversions for Web is a technique that helps businesses gather more detailed first-party data directly from their website. This includes useful customer info like email addresses, phone numbers, and shipping addresses, and can even include other relevant details depending on the business type and customer interactions. By collecting this specific data, businesses get a better understanding of their customers and can create more personalized and targeted marketing campaigns. This ultimately leads to better customer engagement, higher conversion rates, and business growth.
Privacy Compliance:
Considering the current privacy landscape, where on one end users demand privacy and on the other end, search engines and other marketing platforms emphasize user privacy, it is absolutely necessary to be privacy compliant in order to stay away from being penalized or worse. As Enhanced Conversions operates within strict privacy regulations, it ensures businesses use first-party data by abiding with privacy laws such as GDPR and CCPA.
It respects the user’s privacy while collecting the first-party data directly from the users. By implementing Enhanced conversions for web, you are not left with accurate data, but you can maintain your customers trust, which is essential for any long-term marketing strategy to work out for good.
Furthermore, staying compliant makes the customers feel their data is being handled securely and transparently; they are more likely to engage, providing richer insights that can be used responsibly.
Cross-Device Tracking:
Enhanced Conversions for Web helps track user behavior across multiple devices and sessions, consolidating the data into unified customer profiles. This enables a more comprehensive view of the customer journey, from initial interaction to final conversion. By stitching together interactions across desktop, mobile, and tablet, Enhanced Conversions for Web ensures that the first-party data is holistic and reflective of the customer’s true preferences.
With cross-device tracking, you can refine the customer journey mapping and create more effective retargeting campaigns. Additionally, incorporating robust 1PD ops platforms like CustomerLabs can provide you with a 360 view of your customer. These platforms can help you to accurately understand where users are dropping off in the sales/marketing funnel and to optimize marketing efforts for various touchpoints, delivering the right message, which leads to higher engagement and better ROI.
Moving further, let’s discuss the benefits of this powerful conversion measurement for the long run.
Long-Term Benefits of Enhanced Conversions
The advantages of Enhanced Conversions is thoroughly dependent on the quality of the user data. Higher the data quality, higher are the benefits that you can yield from your campaigns. Enhanced conversions can significantly impact the overall ad performance, with durable benefits that drive better data accuracy and ROI.
A few benefits are listed below for you:
Increased Conversion Observability
With Enhanced Conversions, you will be able to recover the lost conversions that were caused due to privacy regulations or browser changes. Additionally, by tapping into first-party data, you can identify new conversions that might otherwise go unnoticed, ensuring no opportunity is missed.
Improved Bidding & Attribution
By providing high-quality data to bidding models like Target ROAS (tROAS) and Target CPA (tCPA), Enhanced Conversions refine optimization processes. Attribution models, such as Data-Driven Attribution (DDA), also benefit, delivering more precise credit allocation across touchpoints.
Better Conversion Reporting
Enhanced data observability allows for more accurate conversion modeling. This ensures that you can take advantage of the conversion reporting on campaign performance with greater precision, gaining valuable insights to guide future strategies.
Superior Campaign Performance
Leveraging Enhanced Conversions will increase the efficiency of the overall performance of the campaign. This will gradually result in improved conversion rates (CVRs), increased return on ad spend (ROAS), and lower cost per acquisition (CPA). These improvements also bring higher statistical significance to incrementality studies, validating the true impact of campaigns.
With these transformative advantages, Enhanced Conversions empower advertisers to achieve unparalleled insights and results. However, the foundation lies in the quality of the data that we send to the ad platforms.
We are confident that by now you will be familiar with how and why enhanced conversions are vital for your businesses.
Conclusion
Enhanced Conversions for Web marks a pivotal advancement in conversion tracking, enabling businesses to achieve greater precision in their marketing efforts. By improving attribution accuracy and strengthening the value of first-party data, this feature empowers marketers to make informed, data-driven decisions that drive success.
As digital marketing becomes increasingly reliant on accurate data, the role of 1PD Ops (First-Party Data Operations) cannot be overstated. By seamlessly integrating Enhanced Conversions with a robust 1PD Ops strategy, businesses can unlock deeper insights, ensure compliance, and maximize the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns.
Leverage the power of Enhanced Conversions and a well-structured 1PD Ops approach to elevate your marketing strategy, outperform competitors, and thrive in a data-centric landscape.
Book a demo now and start building a future-proof marketing foundation today!
