In the late 2020, Apple took a stand on privacy and force attribution privacy on all their devices. This became a turning point for all advertising partners to prevent businesses tracking users on a cookie level. While it is great for all of us, users, it is terrible for business. Advertisers are finding it hard to attribute which sales came from which campaign.

“Half my advertising spend is wasted; the trouble is, I don’t know which half.” — John Wanamaker

Thus, Google came out with a solution to recover lost conversion while protecting users’ privacy. My friends, allow me to present to you, Enhanced Conversion.

What is Enhanced Conversion?

• Improved Measurement It goes beyond standard conversion tracking by using additional, privacy-safe customer data (like a hashed email address) when a conversion happens on your website. This data is then compared to data of signed-in Google users to better attribute conversions directly to your ads.
• Privacy-focused Design User data is protected. First-party customer data collected (emails, names, address, etc.) are hashed (converted into unreadable code using the SHA256 hashing algorithm) before being securely compared to Google’s data. No human will be able to access this “matched” data. Thus, preventing businesses to identify any users. They only get a number of matched conversion, but not the actual User Data.

Why should we implement it?

• More Accurate Data: Capture conversions that might have been missed by standard tracking, especially when cookies are blocked or privacy standard prevent that attribution from happening.
• Smarter Bidding: Improved conversion data informs bidding strategies to drive better results and greater return on investment. A more accurate data = the machine is optimizing to the correct outcome.

How to implement it?

You have a few options for setting up enhanced conversions:

Using the Google Tag:

• You’ll directly modify your website’s code to capture and hash first-party user data during the conversion process. There is also an option to auto-detect email and pass it to Google Ads. You may also select manual CSS selector to pull the User data on the page where your conversion tag get fired.

Using Google Tag Manager (We will talk about this at part 2):

• Tag Manager makes it easier without changing your website code. You’ll use tags and triggers to implement enhanced conversion tracking. This is a great middle ground offering simplicity and customization.
• Read it in this post: https://adsciting.com/2024/06/24/google-ads-enhanced-conversion-and-how-to-implement-it-using-google-tag-manager/

Google Ads API (We will talk about this at part 3):

• This method is geared towards advanced users or businesses handling larger-scale data management. Check out my guide for API upload but this is without Enhanced Conversion. I will release another guide for the enhanced conversion API

Using Google Tag

Step 1: Enable Enhanced Conversions in Google Ads

• Navigate to your Google Ads account.
• Click the Tools and Settings icon (wrench) in the top right.
• Under “Measurement”, click “Conversions”.
• Go to your existing purchase event.
• Toggle “Turn on enhanced conversions for web” on.
• Review the compliance statement and agree to terms.
• Select the “Google site tag” option.

• You can select Auto function here but from experience, most of the time, it does not work. You may select auto and give it a test. You may also select manual CSS selector to pull the User data on the page where your conversion tag get fired. If your conversion page does not have User Data or it just simply doesn’t work. You may need to edit the site code, if so, proceed below.

Pro tips: Just try the auto function first and test it out.

Step 2: Collect and Hash User Data

• On the page where user data appear in your page (e.g., a shipping details page, sign up page, login page), add JavaScript code to:
• — Collect user data like email, name, address, and phone number.
• — Importantly, use the SHA256 algorithm to hash (irreversibly convert into unreadable code) all the sensitive data before it’s sent to Google. Google will reject all data that come in unhashed.
• — Example (ensure you adjust to reflect data you actually collect):

// Example - adjust variables as needed
var email = "customer@example.com";
// sha256 function is not included in this guide.
// But you can easily Google search it.
var hashedEmail = sha256(email);
// Hash additional data similarly if needed
gtag('set', 'user_data' {
// You can input phone or home address as well.
// Do ensure phone is in a E.164 standard
'email': hashedEmail
});

The above should send user data to Google and when conversion happened, it will match it to Google Sign in Data and match it.

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