Enhanced conversions is a feature that can improve the accuracy of your conversion measurement. It supplements your existing conversion tags by sending hashed first party conversion data from your website to Google Ads.
In this article, we will talk about setting up enhanced conversions via Server-Side GTM. We will skip over some steps in this article, so if you are just getting started with enhanced conversions, I gladly refer to a previous article in which we talked about setting up enhanced conversions from scratch and the various ways of doing it.
Step 1: Set up a user-provided data variable
There are three ways of collecting user-provided data:
- Automatic collection (if available).
- Manual collection with CSS selectors or existing data layer variables.
- Using Code configuration.
In our example, we will use manual collection with a data layer variable: Email.
To set up user-provided data via manual configuration, follow these steps:
- In your web container, go to Variables.
- Create a User-Defined Variable of the type User-Provided Data.
- Set the Type to Manual configuration.
- For the relevant user data field that you would like to provide via enhanced conversions, add a new or existing variable.
In our case, we added the variable {{Email}}, which is a data layer variable that gets pushed whenever an appointment is booked. The other variables can remain not set.
Step 2: Assign the variables to the Google (Analytics 4) tags
This is an important step, as it seems that Google’s own documentation is incomplete. Here are the steps you’ll need to follow:
1. First, we will need to add the user-provided data to the Configuration settings of our Google Tag (previously Google Analytics 4 Configuration Tag). Under Configuration settings, add a new Configuration parameter called user_data. Set the Value to the User-provided Data variable we previously created.
However, we found that adding this variable only to the Google Tag will not be enough. The first-party data will only be picked up completely by the Google Ads conversions if we add the parameter to the GA4 Events used for the conversions as well.
2. Add the parameter user_data to all GA4 event tags you will be using for your Google Ads conversions. In our case, the appointment event.
Step 3: Enable user-provided data in your server-side Google Ads Conversion Tags
The last step is fairly simple, as the user-provided data you’ll be sending to your server container via your GA4 tags will be automatically picked up by your Google Ads tags by clicking a simple checkbox:
- In your server workspace, open the Tags menu.
- Edit the Google Ads Conversion Tracking tag.
- Check Include user-provided data checkbox.
To validate your implementation, you can check in Google Ads (after at least 48 hours of implementation) if your set up is working properly. Once you are in Google Ads, go to “Tools & Settings”, then “Conversions”. Select the right conversion action and go to “Diagnostics”. There you’ll see the status “Recording enhanced conversions” if everything is implemented correctly.
Robbe Desmyttere
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