Below, we explain what these enhanced conversions are, where they come from, how they work, why they are important, and answer other questions about them.
What are enhanced conversions and where do they come from?
Enhanced conversions is the new way that Google Ads has to measure the conversions of those users who have not accepted third-party cookies. They arise in response to the industry's need to have a traceability of this type of conversions, and to be able to correctly attribute the impact of each campaign in the total performance.
The rules of the game in terms of measurement are changing: it is increasingly difficult to measure the results of our campaigns because, unlike before, accepting cookies is no longer a "sine qua non" condition for accessing the content of a website. This fact, a consequence of regulatory changes pushed by some governments to safeguard the privacy of Internet users, has become a workhorse for companies such as Google or Apple - and a real headache for advertisers and agencies.
How do enhanced conversions work?
For almost any online conversion, whether it is a lead or a final purchase, a minimum of user data is required (name, email, phone number, or postal address are some of them). Until now, this information was not collected at the conversion event; that is: you knew the what, but not the who. What the enhanced conversions do is to save one or more of these data and "match" that information with the information Google has about your users to attribute each conversion to their respective campaigns. Basically, we add an extra field in the conversion event (such as the email of the person who converted) so that Google checks if it has someone in its database with that email. If so, Google will target that conversion in the campaigns that have been involved.
Enhanced conversions have to be configured on every conversion action performed within the website, so they would not apply to call conversions, form submission conversions via extension or those imported from Analytics.
Personal data collected by the enhanced conversions is encrypted using the hash technology, which is the same used for the uploading of customer data in compliance with the privacy policy.
What information to put in the enhanced conversions?
As we discussed in the previous point, there are several data that we can collect to nurture our conversions. It may seem that the more data we add the better, but the truth is that the opposite is true. It is recommended to add only the email address, as other data such as phone number or mailing address are more susceptible to change over time and without being updated in the Gmail account.
Why is it important to implement enhanced conversions?
Although at the time of writing this post enhanced conversions are still in beta, everything points to them being the future of Google Ads measurement. We are moving faster and faster towards a "cookieless" digital landscape: in fact, many websites already offer the possibility to reject all cookies as a first option, so we can expect the percentage of users who do not accept them to grow over time. This places us in a scenario where by not implementing cookies we will gradually lose relevant information about the performance of our campaigns, which, on the one hand, will reduce our ability to analyze performance; and on the other hand, will make it difficult for Google's algorithm to optimize towards our business objective.
According to Google data, the main benefits of implementing enhanced conversions are:
Recover conversions lost due to privacy changes.
Improve bidding strategies by having more data available to them
Improving kpis such as ROAS, CPA or CR
How to set up enhanced conversions?
This is the million dollar question. And the answer is that there are several ways to set them up. It can be done through Google Tag Manager and also with the global tag of the website, it all depends on how you are measuring your conversions up to that moment. Whichever option you choose, if you are not a specialist in web analytics, we recommend that you contact a professional to do it, as there is a high probability that you do not configure it correctly (or worse, that you touch something you should not and stop measuring conversions). As is well known, cheap is expensive.
Why work with us?
At Rocket Digital, we are ready to help you. We have an Analytics team with extensive experience in the implementation of improved conversions, having already worked with different clients and generating multiple success stories for their businesses.
If you want us to help you measure your business conversions in this new "cookieless" world, please contact us, do not hesitate to contact us!
