In this guide I will show you how to easily set up enhanced conversions in a Google Ads account through Google Tag Manager.
Hello everyone!
A few days ago, I had this recommendation on one of my client’s Google Ads account telling me that there is an incremental number of conversions not able to be recorded in full, due to the absence of Enhanced Conversions.
So, I decided to dig in and go all the way down to the process of implementation.
Having already used Google Tag Manager to set up website tags, this saved me a lot of fuss I guess, as again it can be used for setting up enhanced conversions, too.
In my case, there is a booking form that the user fills in with data like email, full name, address, city, telephone number etc.
By enabling enhanced conversions, there is an improved version of conversions recorded by matching them with the users’ information.
Before you begin
Make sure that you have Google Ads conversion tracking set up using Google Tag Manager. Also, review the customer data policies and agree to the enhanced conversions Terms of Service and policies in Google Ads.
The option is on the menu → tools & settings → measurements → conversions → selecting the conversion of the form submission.
The steps are:
- Open Google Tag Manager. Select the property of your choice. On the left side menu go to Tags and select the tag you have created referring to Google Ads Conversion Tracking of the form submission.
2. After selecting it, on the tag configuration you have to select the option “include user-provided data from your website”. Then click ‘New Variable’.
3. In the new window opened, the variable type should be the default ‘user-provided data’. Then, select ‘Manual Configuration’.
4. For the following fields: email, phone, first name, surname, country and postcode we do the following procedure for each field:
- Select from the drop-down menu the last option ‘new variable’.
- Edit the variable configuration
- Selecting DOM Element
- In the ‘Selection Method’ Field we choose ‘CSS Selector’
- Watch in 1.31 minute of the following video of how you can easily retrieve the name of the element you should paste in the field ’email’.
Note
At least one of the following fields must be provided:
- Email field is mandatory and preferred.
- First name, last name, postcode, country (all together are required). You can optionally provide the street address, city and region as additional match keys, and/or
- A phone number can also be provided along with an email, or full name and address.
All the data sent are unhashed data, which Google will normalise and hash before the data reaches the servers, for security reasons.
Don’t forget to save everything and press submit and publish your tag!
What Next?
From this point and in the next 48 hours, the Google Ads account should have started recording enhanced conversions.
There is a Diagnostics tab in particular to check, on the conversions section:
However, I recommend checking out immediately after the installation following the above steps with the aid of Google Developing Tools.
- Right click on your web page where the conversion is taking place.
- Select Inspect.
- Select the “Network” tab.
- Enter “google” in the search bar.
- Find the network request that’s going to “googleadservices.com/pagead/conversion/” (or “google.com/pagead/1p-conversion/” on some browsers).
- Click Payload to view the list of query string parameters.
- Look for a parameter “em” with a hashed string as the value. The value should start with “tv.1~em” followed by a long string of characters. If you see the “em” parameter, this means that the enhanced conversions tag is picking up and hashing the enhanced_conversion_data object.
Note: If you see the “em” parameter but you only see “tv.1~em” without a long hashed string following it then you’re sending the enhanced conversions parameter but it’s empty. This may happen if user-provided data isn’t available at the time of conversion.