Enhanced Conversions

Enhanced Conversions is a feature that sends hashed first-party customer data, like an email address, alongside your conversions to recover conversions the browser dropped and sharpen both measurement and Smart Bidding.

You turn this on because tracking is not what it used to be. Cookies get blocked, consent gets declined, and Safari clears things out, so plenty of real sales and leads never make it back to your account through the tag alone. That gap is invisible until you realize your reported conversions are lower than what your sales team or your bank statement actually shows.

Here is what happens under the hood. When someone converts, your site already collected data like their email or phone number. Enhanced Conversions takes that first-party data, scrambles it with a one-way hash so the raw details never leave in readable form, and sends the hashed version to Google. Google matches it against signed-in accounts and credits conversions that the cookie-based tag would have missed. You typically see more conversions reported and, more importantly, Smart Bidding gets a fuller picture to optimize against, which tends to help performance after the privacy changes that broke old tracking.

The catch you cannot skip. This is privacy-sensitive data, and it has to be set up correctly, with proper user consent and correct hashing, or you should not be running it at all. Enhanced Conversions also improves matching; it does not resurrect a tracking setup that is fundamentally broken. If your base tag is misfiring or your data layer is empty, layering this on top fixes nothing.

Get consent and hashing right first, then let it recover what privacy took away.