Set up Google Ads enhanced conversions

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. -