Enhanced conversions are an option available to all advertisers who have the conversion tag installed. Even without any tracking issues, some conversion events can go untracked, or unattributed to a campaign or channel, causing inaccuracies in reporting data and subsequent gaps in the data that bid strategies and optimization features rely on.
What does the Enhanced Conversions feature do?
Enhanced Conversions improves accuracy within your reporting data, allowing both automated and manual optimizations to be based on fuller, more thorough conversion data.
Why is there conversion data missing in the first place?
The digital ecosystem is complex, and users carry out conversion actions across different logins, different devices, and different platforms. ‘Tag-based’ conversion tracking will recognize when an event has happened, but it won’t consider broader actions that may have occurred elsewhere as a result of your search campaign.
How do Enhanced Conversions find these ‘lost conversions’?
When a customer carries out a transaction with your business (a purchase, booking an appointment, requesting information etc), it’s likely there will be a degree of first-party data that is shared with your business, for example, the customers name, email address, street address, or contact number. Enhanced conversions allow this first-party data to be shared with Google so other conversions that have been completed by the same Google login can be attributed to your Google campaign.
What’s the problem with having a few ‘lost’ conversions?
Well firstly, it’s often more than ‘just a few’, with many advertisers reporting a conversion volume increase of several percentage points since activating Enhanced Conversions. This updated conversion volume could lead you to make different decisions for your business, for example regarding paid media budget, or which lines of business you choose to focus on.
Secondly, there are an increasing number of automated functions within your search campaigns, all of which rely on the performance data within your account in order to make informed decisions. By undervaluing the conversion contribution from a certain keyword, automated functions such as bid strategies may opt to abstain from entering your advert into certain auctions, which could cause you to miss a conversion opportunity. This missing data could also undermine the engine’s efforts to understand what a ‘successful’ and ‘unsuccessful’ journey looks like, providing less context for automated features.
Enhanced Conversions can be set up in three ways:
- By making small configuration changes to your existing conversion tag
- Implementing the configuration changes through Google Tag Manager
- Using the Google Ads API to send the first-party data to Google
The main benefit of enhanced conversions is to improve accuracy within your reporting data. This will then help improve campaign decisions by providing more data-driven optimizations and better-attributed conversions.
