Enhanced conversions are the cheapest measurement upgrade available in Google Ads. They take first-party data you already collect — email, phone, name — hash it in the browser, and send it alongside the conversion so Google can match conversions that cookies alone would miss.
Typical recovery is 5–15% more conversions attributed. On a $10,000 monthly budget that is meaningful.
Enhanced conversions for web vs for leads
Enhanced conversions for web improve matching of conversions that happen on your site — form submissions, purchases. Enhanced conversions for leads let you upload offline outcomes later using the same hashed identifiers, so a lead that becomes a customer three weeks after the click can still be credited.
Lead generation businesses usually want both. They are configured separately.
Prerequisites
Accept the customer data terms in Google Ads. Have a privacy policy that discloses the practice. Collect at least email or phone on the conversion page. Tags must be implemented through Google Tag Manager or gtag — enhanced conversions do not work with a bare conversion pixel copied into HTML.
Setting it up in Google Tag Manager
Enable enhanced conversions on the conversion action in Google Ads and choose Google Tag Manager. In GTM, open the conversion tracking tag, tick "Include user-provided data", and create a User-Provided Data variable.
Use manual configuration wherever possible: point the variable at the specific email and phone fields rather than relying on automatic collection. Automatic detection works on simple forms and fails quietly on multi-step forms, iframes and single-page apps.
The part people get wrong
The user data must be available in the DOM or the data layer at the moment the conversion tag fires. On a form that redirects to a thank-you page, the email is gone unless you deliberately pass it through — in a data layer push, a URL parameter or server-rendered on the confirmation page.
Push the hashed or raw values into the data layer on submit, then fire the conversion tag from that data layer event. Google hashes with SHA-256 before transmission; raw values never leave the browser.
Verifying it works
In Google Ads, the conversion action's diagnostics tab shows whether enhanced conversion data is being received and the match rate. Give it 48 hours. A match rate under 40% usually means the field selector is wrong rather than that your users are unmatched.
Enhanced conversions sit alongside, not instead of, server-side tracking and measurement — they solve different halves of the same data-loss problem.