This feature is part of an open beta and is subject to change.
Overview
Enhanced conversions is a feature in Google Analytics that can improve the accuracy of your conversion measurement and unlock more powerful bidding in Google Ads. It supplements the events you've marked as conversions.
When a customer completes a conversion on your website, you may receive first-party customer data such as an email address, home address, and/or phone number. This data can be collected and sent to Google in a hashed form through user-provided data collection, and then used to enhance your conversion measurement through enhanced conversions.
Note: Google is committed to protecting the confidentiality and security of your data. We'll keep your data confidential and secure using the same industry-leading standards we use to protect our own users’ data. We only report aggregated conversions.
Benefits
Enhanced conversions helps to produce a more complete picture of your cross-channel conversion attribution so you can better understand how all your channels are performing, and use this more complete understanding when bidding or reporting in linked Google products.
Enhanced conversions matches your first-party data with Google data from consented, signed-in Google users to fill in gaps for Google Ads ad interactions that may be unobservable when other identifiers are not available.
Considerations
- Managing user-provided data in property settings: Be aware that acknowledging the feature policy is permanent. However, you can uncheck the checkbox. When you uncheck the checkbox, we won’t process user-provided data in the Google Analytics property. Your Google tag may still collect user provided data, but that data won’t be transmitted to your Google Analytics property with the checkbox unchecked. You can disallow user-provided data collection from your tag or through Google tag settings under “Allow user provided data capabilities”.
- Modeling and attribution availability: To ensure data accuracy, improvements to models and attribution by enhanced conversion may take up to one month to appear in your Google Analytics and Google Ads reports and bidding.
- Cross-device remarketing: If your property has audiences, audience membership for audiences based on cross-device user interactions may decrease. This is because signed-in user data (User-ID) is separate from signed-out user data. Remarketing to these audiences on other devices may be impacted. Allowing Google signals can help you mitigate this.
- Demographics and interests: Data for users with a User-ID will be derived from user-provided data from signed-in users, instead of cookie and device identifiers.
- Traffic attribution: Adopting user-provided data can sometimes over-attribute traffic to “direct”, especially for websites with frequent user login and logout activity. This happens because complete first-party data identifiers may not be available across all sessions. Enhancements are in development to improve identifier processing and utilization in Google Analytics, including client_ids, to better link user journeys for accurate attribution.
- Measurement protocol: If you’re using Measurement Protocol, you must send both the User-ID and user-provided data after activating the feature. Follow all best practices detailed in Send user-provided data with User-ID using the Measurement Protocol.
Activating enhanced conversions
To activate enhanced conversions in Google Analytics for properties with web data streams, complete these steps:
- Set up user-provided data collection for your website
- Link your Google Analytics 4 property to Google Ads
If you already implemented enhanced conversions with Google Ads Conversion Tracking, and you meet the prerequisites for enhanced conversions in Google Analytics (i.e., linked a Google Ads account and set up for a web data stream), you can either:
- (Recommended) Combine the Google tag for Google Analytics into the Google tag for Google Ads or
- Make some configuration updates to send your customer data to Analytics if you don’t want to combine your Google tags. This shouldn’t require any code changes, and you’ll just simply copy over the configurations you’ve set for enhanced conversions over to the Google Analytics 4 tagging configurations.
User-provided data settings are configured in your Google tag settings:
- In Admin, under Data collection and modification, click Data streams.
Note: The previous link opens to the last Analytics property you accessed. You must be signed in to a Google Account to open the property. You can change the property using the property selector. You must be an Editor or above at the property level to assign roles and data restrictions.
- Select the web stream where you want to configure the user-provided data settings.
- Under “Google tag”, click Configure tag settings.
- In the “Settings” section, click Allow user-provided data capabilities and copy your configurations from Google Ads conversion tracking if available.
If your site uses Google Tag Manager, you’ll need to send the user_data
as an event parameter on your Google Analytics: GA4 Event tags. Learn how to set up the automatic or manual configuration of user-provided data in Google Tag Manager.
Enhanced conversions in Google Ads vs. Google Analytics
Enhanced conversions in Google Ads and Google Analytics serve similar purposes: they can help you improve the accuracy of your conversion measurement. If you use both platforms, setting up enhanced conversions in Google Analytics has additional benefits compared to setting it up just in Google Ads.
For example, in Google Analytics, you can also get demographics and interests insights, and enhanced conversions can provide insight for both paid and organic channel measurement. In addition to this, enhanced conversions in Google Analytics will offer a first-party audience integration via Customer Match.
Setting up enhanced conversions in Google Ads and Google Analytics
Whether you need to set up enhanced conversions in Google Ads, in Google Analytics, or in both platforms depends on if and how you use both platforms. In most cases, setting up enhanced conversions does not automatically apply to both platforms.
- If you only use Google Analytics, you only need to configure the collection of user-provided data to enable Enhanced conversions in Google Analytics. No actions are required in Google Ads.
- If you use both Google Analytics and Google Ads, but you are not importing Google Analytics conversions into Google Ads, you need to configure the collection of user-provided data to get enhanced conversions in Google Analytics. If you use Google Ads conversion tracking and want enhanced conversions in Google Ads, you need to set up enhanced conversions for Google Ads.
- If you use both Google Analytics and Google Ads, and you are importing Google Analytics conversions into Google Ads, you need to configure the collection of user-provided data to get enhanced conversions in Google Analytics. In this setup, enhanced conversions are automatically shared with the Google Ads account in which you import Google Analytics conversions, and no further action is needed in Google Ads.
- If you use both Google Analytics and Google Ads, and you are importing Google Analytics conversions into Google Ads and you use Google Ads conversion tracking in the same account or MCC, you need to configure the collection of user-provided data to get enhanced conversions in Google Analytics. In addition to this, you need to set up enhanced conversions for Google Ads conversion tracking as well.
- If you decide to set up enhanced conversions in both Google Ads and Google Analytics and you measure the same type of conversion in the same Google Ads account using both types of conversion tracking. For example, both measure a purchase conversion, make sure to only use one conversion as your primary goal, to prevent double counting the same conversion in your campaigns. Learn more about goal settings.