Before we jump right into Google Enhanced Conversions, I want to set a bit of context about why it is that I'm telling you the philosophy, but also how that came about.
Why Server Side Conversions are more accurate than Client Side Conversions
So it all kicked off with iOS 14, advertisers that were making a lot of money were suddenly losing money, but it all comes down to, and you're looking at this pretty complicated image here, but this is a representation of your ad networks, your website, your CRM, your cart, if you're running a shopping cart, and the technologies that are involved there, the data that's going backwards and forwards. And this is kind of like how I explain client(browser) side conversion tracking and server side conversion tracking, so this is what this is all about.
In the past, browser-based tracking solutions worked really well, but I've kind of colored these in red here showing, you know, this is danger. What's happening is over time this has become more and more unreliable because of ad blockers, because of iOS 14, and now other technologies that are really filtering out the browser-based conversion data. But we still have the capability of connecting with our own server, right? Anything that shares the same root domain as our main server has a trusted connection, meaning we can get data from users' browsers back to our own servers as long as they share the same root domain as our main website.
And the reason why that still happens is because if these ad-blocking technologies block the connection between your user's device and your own website, then most modern websites would stop functioning, right, because they're very responsive, they're sending data back and forth all the time with, you know, notifications and chimes and, you know, friends messaging them. A lot of modern technologies rely upon this real-time connection between the devices and your own website. But what's not trusted, what these ad-blocking technologies are not doing is they're not trusting the connection between your users' devices and third-party ad platforms. That's what's getting blocked.
If you're able to get the data from your website somehow back to your own server or a subdomain of your own server, then you can do whatever you want with that data within reason as long as it's legal and as long as it's compliant with CCPA and GDPR. But as long as you're legally allowed to, then you can take that data, repackage it, and send it off to Google Ads, Facebook Ads, Pinterest, TikTok, wherever you want. You can reuse that data as many times as you want by doing it from the server side. And the benefit of that is it cannot be blocked by these ad-blocking technologies.
Google Enhanced Conversions
I'm sure it's no surprise to anyone that our measurement landscape is changing due to several privacy changes. Previously, we lived in a world of fully observable data, like cookies and device identifiers. However, evolving user expectations of privacy have led to additional privacy regulations and restrictions on cookies, changing the way the ecosystem measures conversions. Enhanced Conversions is one of the products in Google privacy-centric measurement portfolio that was developed to help preserve accurate measurements when fewer cookies are available. Enhanced Conversions allow conversion tags to capture hashed customer data. Advertisers collect data on their conversion pages and then match it against Google-logged-in data. The enhanced conversions feature is currently available for Search and YouTube in Google Ads and Google Analytics 4. Using enhanced conversions has several benefits. The short-term benefit is that advertisers will see more accurate conversion reporting. Early testers of enhanced conversions have seen a median conversion rate uplift of 5% on Search and average of 17% conversion uplift on YouTube.
To use enhanced conversions, an advertiser should be
1.Using site-wide tagging using Google Tag Manage or Omnitrack.
2.Have Google Ads conversion tracking as their conversion source.
3.Have a web page where customers submit data in clear text The enhanced conversions feature works best for deep conversion types, such as a purchase or sign-ups where customer data is required.
Google offer advertisers a lot of flexibility in terms of how they can implement enhanced conversions. Currently, there are three types of implementations possible for enhanced conversions
1.Automatic. The quickest way to implement enhanced conversions is automatic.
2.Manual
3.API. Some sophisticated advertisers who want to pass data server-to-server can do so using the Enhanced Conversions API. Or you can use Omnitrack which has already implemented server side enhanced conversions solution for you.