Google Introduces New Enhanced Conversions for Leads

Google Ads now offers you an easier way to import offline conversions: enhanced conversions for leads.

Offline conversions may occur due to an ad that, instead of generating a direct sale online, starts a customer down a path that converts into a sale over the phone or in your office. But how do you know that your Google Ads generated the deal? 

Tracking offline sales required developer resources, CRM, and website changes in the past. However, things got easier with Google's new enhanced conversions for leads: you no longer need to make changes to your CRM or website. Instead, you can set up your offline lead measurements directly through Google Ads or Google Tag Manager.

Enhanced conversions for web and offline leads work similarly: all use a secure one-way hashing algorithm called SHA-256 (Secure Hash Algorithm 256-bit) for cryptographic security. This algorithm will protect the confidentiality and security of the consumer data before sending it to Google. 

Consumer data must be available for enhanced conversions to work. Google will need one or more of the following: 

• Email address (preferred)
• Name and home address 
• Phone number (in addition to one of the previous two data inputs)

However, Google will not receive first-party customer data but hashed (anonymized) data captured in your conversion tracking tags.

Enhanced conversions for leads are different than enhanced conversions for web in that they:  

• Help advertisers track offline sales (in-store, phone) from website leads.
• Improve measurement of offline transactions that came from a website lead.
• Allows advertisers to use hashed, first-party user-provided data from website lead forms for offline lead measurement.
• Upon uploading, the provided hashed information is used to attribute back to the corresponding Google Ads campaign.
• No longer require advertisers to modify lead forms or customer relations management (CRM) systems to receive a Google Click ID (GCLID).

Benefits of enhanced conversions for leads:

• Easy to set up: Configure measurement directly from a Google Ads account.
• Better performance: Optimize campaigns to sales and transactions that happen off a website.
• Flexible: Implement using the global site tag or with Google Tag Manager.

Below is a Google infographic that shows how the new enhanced conversions for leads work: