Google Enhanced Conversions: what they are and how to set them up

What are Google's enhanced conversions, and how do I set them up for my online store?

Google Ads knows about a sale when its conversion tag fires and it can connect that conversion to an ad interaction. As cookies expire and browsers block more, that connection fails more often, and the sale is either missed or not credited. Enhanced conversions give Google a second way to make the connection: a hashed piece of first-party customer data sent with the conversion. It is one of the most useful measurement settings in Google Ads, and one of the easiest to set up wrong.

What enhanced conversions do

According to Google's help page, enhanced conversions supplement your existing conversions by sending hashed first-party conversion data, such as an email address, name, home address or phone number, from your website tags or imported offline events. Google hashes it with SHA-256, a one-way algorithm, and uses it to match the conversion to a signed-in Google account that engaged with one of your ads.

There are two variants:

• Enhanced conversions for web, for sales and events that happen on your website. The data is captured when the customer converts.
• Enhanced conversions for leads, for sales that happen off the website after a website lead, such as a deal closed by phone. The hashed data from your forms is matched with the offline conversions you import.

What they do not do

They do not create conversions that did not happen, and they do not change your attribution model or window. They improve matching of conversions Google already receives. If the conversion never reaches Google, because the tag never fired, enhanced conversions cannot help; that is the job of sending conversions from your server, covered in server-side tracking.

They also do not remove refunded orders. For that, Google accepts conversion adjustments by order ID, which we explain in refunds and cancellations: the gap no ad platform subtracts.

Normalize and hash exactly as Google asks

This is where most setups fail silently. Google's rules, from the same help page:

• Remove leading and trailing whitespace.
• Convert the text to lowercase.
• Format phone numbers in the E.164 standard, with the country code (for Mexico, +52 followed by the number).
• Remove the periods that precede the domain in gmail.com and googlemail.com addresses.
• Hash with hex SHA-256.

A value hashed any other way, with a keyed function or before normalizing, is still accepted. It just never matches anyone, and nothing in the interface tells you so.

Set it up step by step

• Turn it on for the conversion action. In Google Ads, open the conversion action's settings, enable enhanced conversions and accept the customer data terms.
• Choose how the data is sent. Through the Google tag, through Google Tag Manager (with a user-provided data variable on the conversion tag), or through the API if you upload conversions from your server.
• Capture the data at the conversion. On the order confirmation page, the email and phone are usually in the order data your platform already exposes. Map them, do not scrape them from the page's text if you can avoid it.
• Send the order ID. Include the transaction ID with every conversion. It prevents the same sale from being counted twice and it is what lets you retract or restate the conversion later.
• Verify. Place a test order, then check the conversion action's diagnostics over the following days to confirm that the data is being received and matched.

How much do they improve measurement?

Google's help page does not publish one figure, and any universal number would mislead: the improvement depends on how many conversions you were losing to expired cookies and cross-device journeys, which varies by store, audience and device mix. The number that matters is in your own account. Compare conversions recorded over the same length of period before and after, with the same campaigns and settings, and read the diagnostics of the conversion action.

Remember what an increase means: more of your real sales matched to Google ads, which helps bidding. It does not mean Google produced more sales, and it can widen the gap between Google's number and your store, for the reasons in why Google Ads reports more conversions than your store.

Where Google is heading

Google now presents the Data Manager API as a unified API for data partners, agencies and advertisers to send first-party audience and conversion data to several Google advertising products in one call. If you are building a new server integration for conversions, check that path first.

Checklist

• Enhanced conversions enabled on the purchase conversion action, customer data terms accepted.
• Email and phone normalized exactly as Google specifies, then hashed with SHA-256.
• Order ID sent with every conversion.
• A test order verified in diagnostics.
• Before and after compared on equal periods, not on the first week.

In Adray, an order that came from a Google ad keeps the click identifier it arrived with (gclid, gbraid or wbraid), which is what ties a verified sale back to a Google click and what a server upload needs. The Meta side of the same idea is in what the Conversions API actually fixes.