Google Ads Enhanced Conversions extension

Using the Google Ads API, you can leverage enhanced conversions by sending first-party customer data in the form of conversion adjustments. Google uses this additional data to improve the reporting of your online conversions driven by ad interactions.

The Google Ads Enhanced Conversions event forwarding extension (heretofore referred to as the Enhanced Conversions extension) provides a user-friendly template to easily implement enhanced conversions for the Google Ads API.

IMPORTANT
Enhanced conversions only work for conversion types where customer data is present, such as subscriptions, sign-ups, and purchases. One or more of the following pieces of customer data must be available, as they are required when configuring a conversion action for an event forwarding rule:
  • Email address (preferred)
  • Name and home address (street address, city, state/region, and postal code)
  • Phone number (must be provided in addition to one of the other two pieces of information above)

Implementation overview

Enhanced conversions leverage the Google Ads API to add first-party data to a conversion that happened on a client device, usually a website. This means that there are two steps to implement enhanced conversions:

  1. Send a conversion from the client.
  2. Use event forwarding to send additional first-party data that enhances the conversion data sent from the client.
TIP
To associate the client-side conversion event with the first-party data sent from event forwarding, the transaction_ID must be the same in both calls. For more information on where this value must be provided for each service, see the sections on configuring conversion actions for tags and event forwarding, respectively.

Since sending conversion events involves both a client-side and server-side implementation, this document covers the prerequisite steps for setting up the client-side Google Global Site Tag (gtag) extension in addition to the Enhanced Conversions extension for event forwarding.

The following video provides an introduction to the Enhanced Conversions extension and walks through the implementation steps at a high level:

Transcript
Hi, I’m John from the Adobe product team. In this video, I’m going to show you how to implement Google enhanced conversions. By the end of this tutorial you’ll be able to, first, send conversion data to Google from a website using Adobe’s tag management system known as Tags. Second, you’ll be able to enhance that conversion with additional first-party hash data server-side using Adobe’s server-side product known as event forwarding. And all of this is for the purpose of increasing your conversion rates. In fact, Google found in early studies that the median increase in conversion rate jumped by 5% for Search and a whopping 17% on YouTube. So with that, let’s go ahead and jump into the product. We’ll begin by starting in part one of the implementation which is sending a conversion event from the website. To do that, you’ll log into Tags, go to the catalog and search Google Global Site Tag. Once you find it, hit Install and then you’ll begin the configuration. First, you’ll want to add an account by clicking Add Account and then entering your account name, account ID, and under product, you’ll click and select Google Ads. Once that’s done hit Add Account and the configuration is now complete. Now we need to define under what situations a conversion event happens. In this case I have a form submission that counts as a conversion. So I’ll go to that rule and then I will go to Actions and add an action. You’ll go to extension and select Google Global Site Tag. And under action type, you’ll select Send an Event. Once you click that, there’s just a few fields that are required that you need to fill out. For event name, you’ll need to enter conversion and this needs to be all lower case. You’ll scroll down, and this is very critical, you’ll enter a key called Transaction_ID and then you’ll add your order ID. This value is very important to capture because it’s this value that Google’s going to use to match the client-side conversion with the enhanced conversion that you’re going to send from event forwarding. And then down below you’ll also need to enter in your conversion label. You’ll select Keep Changes and then go to the publishing flow, and of course build your library and publish it to production. I’ll now begin part two of this implementation, which is sending an enhanced conversion from event forwarding. To do that log into event forwarding. And in the left navigation click Secrets. The Google Ads API requires a new access token every hour. So what we’re going to do now is I’ll show you how to create that. You’ll click Add Secret and for the sake of this demo, I’m only going to create one secret for my development environment. You will need to create one for each of your environments, dev, stage, and prod. Underneath type I will select Google OAuth 2 and then click Create Secret.
I’ll then click on the secret that I would like to to create here and then select the Google account that has access to the ads account that you want to send conversion data to. Click Continue. And now Magic has happened on the back end and we will now manage the hourly refresh of that access token. Now we need to create a data element to map to the secret that we just created. So you’re going to click on Add Data element. I’m going to show you one that I created previously. You’ll click Ad Data Element and then underneath type you’re going to select Secret. And then from here you’re going to select each of the environments and click on the Google Secret that you just created. Of course, aligning to dev, stage, and prod. From there, you’re going to save to library. And now just like on the client side we need to define the situation in which this enhanced conversion should fire. In my case, it’s a form submit. So you’re going to click the plus button here to add a new action type. Underneath extension, you’ll select Google Ads enhanced conversions, and then underneath action type you’ll select Send Conversion. Here you can enter the customer ID and if you enter a value here, it will override the customer ID that you shared on the configuration. This is useful if you have multiple Google Ads accounts that you’re managing through a single implementation. You’ll then add the conversion label here and the transaction ID. And just to reiterate, this transaction ID is so critical because this is what Google is going to use to match the client-side conversion with the enhanced data that you want to add to that conversion here in event forwarding. So once again, this value must match what you sent on the client in order for this to work as expected. You’ll come down to User Identification and you have to complete either email, phone number, or all of the fields under full address. For the sake of this demo I’m only going to send email and phone number. If you’re sending unhashed data to event forwarding then we have the functionality to normalize and hash that data. All you do is select a data element and then turn on normalize and hash on these toggles. This will normalize the data to make sure that it conforms to Google Standard, and then run a SHA-256 hash on the data to make sure that you’re sending data securely. You’ll click Keep Changes and then once again, publish to production. I’m now going to show you all of this working in a live environment. This is my locally deployed website. I’m going to fill out this form.
I’ll enter my email here and my phone number, and then a message. Hello there. And what you see on the right-hand side this is Adobe Experience Platform Debugger. This is a Firefox or Chrome extension that gives you live data into your event forwarding implementation. This is very powerful so I’m going to scroll through all of these logs. I have a lot of things going on here. I’m enriching the original data, sending data to Facebook, sending data to Google Analytics, my own internal data warehouse. And as I scroll down, I should also see data being received and sent to the Google Ads API. Here it is right here this fetch call to Google ads.googleapis.com. This is the call that I just made and you’ll notice I got a 200, and this is all of the hashed information that I sent to Google Ads API. You’ll notice that I sent data to event forwarding unhashed, but through the extension we were able to hash that data and normalize it such that the data was accepted successfully. I hope in this video you were able to see how using Adobe products, tags and event forwarding you can send Google enhanced conversions server-side all for the purpose of boosting your conversion rates. Thank you very much. -

Send a conversion using tags

To send a conversion event from on a website, Google Global Site Tag (gtag) must be deployed. You can achieve this using tags by configuring and installing the Google Global Site Tag (gtag) extension.

Configure and install the Google Global Site Tag extension

Navigate to the Data Collection UI or Experience Platform UI and select Tags in the left navigation. Select the tag property you wish to install the extension on, then select Extensions in the left navigation. Under the Catalog tab, locate the Google Global Site Tag (gtag) extension and select Install.

The Google Global Site Tag (gtag) extension being selected under the Extensions view in the Data Collection UI.

The installation dialog appears. From here, select Add Account and provide the following values when prompted:

Account property
Description
Account Name
A unique name for the account. This name is only used within the tags UI.
Account ID
Your Google Ads account ID. To find this value, log into Google Ads and navigate to: Tools and Settings > Conversions > Select a conversion action > Tag Setup > Install the Tag yourself. The account ID string can be found in the code snippet window that starts with AW- or d.
Product
Select Google Ads (AdWords).

When finished, select Add Account, then select Save.

Add a send conversion action conversion-action-tags

After installing the extension, you can start including conversion actions in your tag rules. When creating or editing a rule that listens to the conversion you would like to enhance, select Add under Actions. In the next dialog, select Google Global Site Tag (gtag) from the Extension dropdown, then select Send an event under Action Type.

The Send an event action type being selected within the action configuration view of the rule editing workflow.

Additional controls appear that allow you to configure the gtag event. At a minimum, the following fields must be filled out:

  1. Event Name (Action): Enter conversion as the value.

  2. Add a new field where the key is transaction_id and the value is a data element that contains the transaction ID value.

  3. Conversion Label: Enter the appropriate conversion label from your Google Ads account. To find this value, log into Google Ads and navigate to Tools and Settings > Conversions > Select a conversion action > Tag Setup > Use Google Tag Manager. The conversion label can be found under Instructions.

    note important
    IMPORTANT
    While you are in the tag setup area of your Google Ads account, make sure that enhanced conversions is enabled. To do this, review and accept the Terms of Service, then select Turn on enhanced conversions and API as the implementation method.

After you have configured the action, select Keep Changes to add the action to the rule configuration. When you are satisfied with the rule, select Save to Library.

Finally, publish a new build to enable the changes to the library.

Send first-party data using event forwarding

Once you are able to send conversion events from the client side, you can enhance these conversions using the Enhanced Conversions event forwarding extension.

Create a Google OAuth 2 secret and data element create-secret-data-element

Before you configure the extension, you must create an access token in event forwarding to authenticate to Google Ads API.

See the guide on creating event forwarding secrets for detailed steps. Ensure that you select Google OAuth 2 as the secret type. Continue to follow the prompts, and when asked to select a Google Account profile, select the account that has access to the conversion action you are configuring.

Once the secret is created, create a new data element and select Secret for the data element type. Select the appropriate Google OAuth 2 secret for each environment and select Save to Library.

Configure and install the Enhanced Conversions extension install-enhanced-conversions

Find the Google Ads Enhanced Conversions extension in the event forwarding catalog and select Install.

The Google Ads Enhanced Conversions extension being selected under the Extensions view in the Data Collection UI.

To configure the extension, you must populate the two required fields:

  1. Customer ID: The ID that uniquely identifies your Google Ads account. To find this value, log into Google Ads and navigate to Help > Customer ID.
  2. Access Token Data Element: Select the data element icon ( Data element icon ) and choose the Google OAuth 2 secret data element that you configured in the previous step from the menu.

When finished, select Save to install the extension.

Add a Send Conversion action to a rule conversion-action-event-forwarding

After the extension is installed, you can start to include Send Conversion actions in your event forwarding rules. When creating or editing a rule that listens to the conversion you’d like to enhance, select Add under Actions. In the next dialog, select Google Ads Enhanced Conversions from the Extension dropdown, then select Send Conversion under Action Type.

The Send Conversion action type being selected within the action configuration view of the rule editing workflow.

New controls appear in the right panel that allow you to configure your conversion. At a minimum, the following fields must be completed:

Conversion Information

Input
Description
Customer ID
Your Google Ads customer ID. Defaults to the customer ID you entered when installing the extension.
Conversion ID or Conversion Label
Tracking values obtained from Google Ads when setting up conversion tracking. Values start with AW-.

For details on how to find these values, refer to the Google Ads documentation.
Transaction ID
Select a data element that has the same transaction ID value that is sent from the client side using the Google Global Site Tag extension.

User Identification

  • At least one of the three user identifiers must be included:

    • Email
    • Phone Number
    • Full Address
TIP
User identification data must be hashed before it is sent to Google. If the data is not hashed when event forwarding receives it, select the Normalize & Hash toggle on a given field to instruct the extension to hash the value.
The Normalize & Hash toggle enabled for the Email input within the Send Conversion action configuration form.

When finished, select Keep Changes to add the action to the rule configuration. When you are satisfied with the rule, select Save to Library.

Finally, publish a new event forwarding build to enable the changes to the library.

Next steps

This guide covered how send conversion events to Google Ads using the Enhanced Conversions event forwarding extension. For more information on event forwarding capabilities in Experience Platform, refer to the event forwarding overview.

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