Understanding Enhanced Conversions
What Are Enhanced Conversions?
Enhanced Conversions improve accuracy by sending hashed first-party customer data to Google. This helps Google match conversions to ad interactions even when cookies are restricted.
How It Works:
User clicks your Google Ad
User converts on your site (form, purchase, etc.)
You send hashed user data to Google
Google matches to their signed-in users
Conversion is attributed accurately
Example GTM Setup
Trigger: “Form Submission – Demo Request”
Tag: Google Ads Conversion Tracking with Enhanced Conversions enabled
Variable Mapping: {{Email}}, {{Phone}}, {{Address}} pulled from hidden fields
Sounds neat — until you realise every form on your site is slightly different, hashing must be done correctly, and dataLayer pushes often break after a redesign.
The Gaps Enhanced Conversions Don’t Fill
Here’s the part most PPC blogs gloss over: Enhanced Conversions only solve for Google’s visibility inside Google Ads.
They don’t show you whether LinkedIn or Meta influenced that conversion.
They don’t reconcile against CRM revenue or LTV.
They don’t solve the cross-device journey.
So yes, Enhanced Conversions make Google smarter about its own conversions. But they keep you locked in the “Google-only bubble”. For a performance manager running multi-channel campaigns, that’s not enough.
Why Pair with Spectacle Attribution
Enhanced Conversions are great for helping Google do its job better. But they don’t tell the full story of how your marketing really works. That’s where Spectacle comes in.
Multi-touch attribution — track the real path to conversion, across every channel, not just Google.
Server-side sending — no fragile GTM setups to maintain, just clean data sent directly.
Revenue-first tracking — measure the outcomes that matter, like invoices, subscriptions, and LTV, instead of stopping at form fills.
Cross-channel assist reporting — see when LinkedIn ads, email campaigns, or other touches helped the deal that Google Ads eventually closed.
In short: Enhanced Conversions help Google bid smarter. Spectacle helps you understand how the whole funnel works together.
The GTM Reality
Most teams wrestle with GTM setups: firing the right tags, making sure dataLayer variables are mapped correctly, debugging why hashed emails aren’t passing.
With Spectacle’s server-side tracking, you can skip that pain. We capture the conversion, enrich it with revenue data, and send it server-to-server. No fragile GTM recipes, no guesswork about whether your tag fired.
Instead of a messy GTM container that looks like this:
Let us take care of it:
Impact on Bidding and Budget Decisions
Enhanced Conversions give Google more reliable signals to train its Smart Bidding. That alone improves how the platform allocates budget inside Google Ads. But there’s a limit. The optimisation happens in isolation — Google gets better at hitting its own conversion goals, without context on what those conversions mean for the business.
Adding Spectacle data changes that picture. When you connect conversions to actual revenue and customer retention, you see which campaigns generate value beyond the first form fill.
A common pattern looks like this: Google Search appears to be the strongest channel in-platform, yet half of those leads churn quickly once they hit your CRM. Meanwhile, LinkedIn often shows higher costs, but when you map revenue forward, those customers deliver more lifetime value.
This is the shift from campaign optimisation to business optimisation. Enhanced Conversions help you do the first. Attribution with Spectacle lets you do the second.
Common Pitfalls
Most Enhanced Conversion setups break in similar ways. Data is sent unhashed and rejected by Google. The tag only fires on one form instead of across the site. Safari’s tracking restrictions strip out identifiers. Tags are duplicated, leading to double counting. And perhaps the biggest one — Smart Bidding is often trained on volume metrics like form fills, without checking if those leads ever convert to revenue.
These aren’t just technical errors. They change how budgets get allocated. Training an algorithm on incomplete or low-quality signals always leads to wasted spend.
How to Test and Validate
There are straightforward ways to check if your setup is working. Run Google Tag Assistant to confirm Enhanced Conversions are firing. Review Diagnostics in Google Ads to check match rates. Compare Google-only reporting against multi-touch attribution to see if the platform is over-crediting itself. And when in doubt, run a holdout test by switching Enhanced Conversions off for a portion of traffic to measure the difference.
Testing like this isn’t about catching mistakes for their own sake. It’s how you separate platform reporting from business reality.
Final Word
Enhanced Conversions are worth implementing. They reduce signal loss and give Google better data to work with. But they don’t close the gap between what the platform optimises for and what matters to the business.
If you want bidding models to line up with profit, you need to connect conversions to revenue and customer value. That’s where multi-touch attribution earns its place. Enhanced Conversions keep Google effective. Attribution ensures your decisions stay anchored in reality.