Google Ads Enhanced Conversions (beta)

Send additional user data for attribution to Google Ads from Freshpaint

Enhanced conversions is one of Google's features which aims to provide more accurate conversion tracking using hashed user information. It can provide limited view-through conversion data in a world where third-party cookies are being phased out.

If you are a HIPAA customer, it's important to understand that even though the user information is hashed before being sent to Google, HHS guidance still considers this PII since it does not use a secret. Therefore, you must be extremely careful to avoid sending health data alongside this user information to avoid a HIPAA violation.

Getting Started

These instructions assume you already have a Google Ads destination set up within your Freshpaint account. If you would like help with this or have any questions, please contact your Freshpaint rep or email [email protected].

What You'll Need

1. Access to your Google Ads account

2. Knowledge of which parts of your website have access to user information (most commonly forms)

First, enable enhanced conversions in Google Ads

1. In Campaign Manager, navigate to your advertiser account.

2. Click on Goals > Conversions > Settings.

3. Under “Enhanced conversions”, select the checkbox Turn on Enhanced Conversions and select Google Tag as the setup method.

4. Click Save.

Make sure you select Google Tag as the setup method. Otherwise, Google may not be able to collect enhanced conversions data correctly.

If you are a HIPAA account, you will need to add enhanced conversion properties to the allowlist. If you are not a HIPAA account, you can skip this step.

1. Go to the destination configuration page for Google Ads.

2. Click on Recommended View-Through Properties.

3. Depending on which pieces of user data you decided to send for enhanced conversions, you'll need to add some or all of the following properties to the allowlist:

   1. email

   2. $user_id (used for pulling email from identified users)

   3. phone and/or phone_number

   4. address

If you don't configure your allowlist properties, Google Ads will not receive all the data necessary for utilizing enhanced conversions!

Next, set up sending the enhanced conversion data

How you configure sending the user data will depend on your method of sending data to Freshpaint. We will outline steps for a native Freshpaint implementation and one using Google Tag Manager

Native Freshpaint (using event definitions + transformations)

These instructions assume you already have a Freshpaint event definition and transformation set up to send through the event to Google Ads with the correct conversion label.

Navigate to the Google Ads transformation for the conversion event you have set up and add the following transformations:

• Send Constant Property enhanced_conversions_enabled equal to true (type True/False).

• Rename any properties that are not using the exact keys email, phone, phone_number, or address (eg. renaming Email to email).

For example:

Google Tag Manager (GTM)

These instructions assume you're using GTM to manage Google Ads tags and that you've already migrated your native Google Ads tags to the Freshpaint tag template. If you would like help with this or have any questions, please contact your Freshpaint rep or email [email protected].

1. For each Google Ads tag that you want to enable for enhanced conversions (commonly tags that capture form submits), click the checkbox under the "Enhanced Conversions" section at the bottom.

2. A selection menu will appear, asking you to pick the GTM variable that will capture the desired user data for enhanced conversions. You may need to create a new variable for this.

   1. GTM offers a few different methods to collect user data for enhanced conversions:

      1. Manual configuration (recommended)

      2. Code

      3. Automatic collection

   2. More information to help you make a decision can be found here.

Enhanced Conversions checkbox.

Example of a GTM variable selected for enhanced conversions.

That's it! Your Google Ads conversion events should now be enriched with enhanced conversions data.

To verify that your events contain enhanced conversions data, you can use Event Verification to confirm that the allowlisted properties (email, phone/phone_number, and/or address) are being passed through to Google Ads.

For further assistance, please contact your Freshpaint rep or email [email protected].