Enhanced conversions

How Enhanced conversions works

When a conversion fires (a purchase or lead you told Google to count), your site or server also passes customer data that has been hashed, so Google never receives the raw email. A hashed email is a fingerprint of the address. Google compares the hash to its own signed-in users. If it matches, the conversion is attributed to that person's ad interaction.

There are two versions: enhanced conversions for web, which improves web conversion measurement, and enhanced conversions for leads, which lets you tie an offline sale back to the click that produced the lead.

Let's take a shoe workshop in Mexico as an example. They make leather shoes and sell them online to Mexico and the United States. The shoe workshop has dozens of styles, colors, and sizes. A pair sells for about $180.

Let's take a shoe workshop in Mexico as an example. They make leather shoes and sell them online to Mexico and the United States. A customer in Austin buys a $180 pair. At checkout the customer enters an email address. The shoe workshop's thank-you page fires a Google conversion tag and includes a hashed version of that email (a fingerprint, not the raw address). Google looks up the hash among signed-in users. If the customer was signed into Chrome or Gmail and had clicked a Google Shopping ad last week, Google can credit that ad with the $180 pair even if the usual cookie (a small file the browser stores) was already gone.

Why Enhanced conversions matters

Cookie-based matching keeps degrading. Enhanced conversions replaces some of that loss with data you already own, which makes it part of the same shift as first-party data strategy generally (using information you collected from your own customers).

Recovered conversions also feed Smart Bidding, Google's automated bidding. So the practical benefit for a shoe workshop is better optimization, not just a fuller report. The algorithm can see more of the $180 orders it actually helped close.

How to read Enhanced conversions

Expect reported conversions to rise after you turn Enhanced conversions on. Those conversions were already happening. A shoe workshop did not sell more shoes that week. You are recovering measurement, not generating demand, so do not read the step change as performance.

For leads, this is where Enhanced conversions earns its keep: connecting a closed deal in the CRM (customer relationship software, the sales database) back to the keyword, instead of optimizing toward form fills that never buy.

Common Enhanced conversions mistakes

• Turning Enhanced conversions on without checking consent and the terms you agreed to with customers.
• Comparing a shoe workshop's before and after periods as if the ad accounts changed.
• Assuming Enhanced conversions works for users who are not signed in to Google.