Cookie depreciation has been a hot topic in the PPC world. Browsers like Mozilla Firefox, Safari, and Brave already have restrictions on third-party cookies, and Google has also announced that it will phase out third-party cookie tracking by 2023.

In this new cookieless world, campaign management won’t be the same as before. Serving targeted ads is going to get harder and measuring performance will be difficult.

To improve conversion measurement due to browser restrictions, Google has introduced Enhanced Conversions.

Table of Contents

  1. What is Enhance Conversions?
  2. How Does It Work?
  3. Benefits of Implementing Enhanced Conversions
  4. Who Can Use Enhanced Conversions?
  5. How to Implement Enhanced Conversions in Shopify

What is Enhanced Conversions?

According to Google, “Enhanced Conversions is a Google Ads Conversion tracking feature that helps in tracking conversions when cookies are not available. It allows conversion tags to capture hashed customer data that advertisers collect on their conversion page (e.g. email addresses) and then match it against Google logged-in data.”

Leveraging first-party data is going to be the advertiser’s best bet against cookie depreciation, and Enhanced Conversions helps you achieve that.

How Does It Work?

When a customer interacts with your ad and makes a purchase on your website, their data is captured through your conversion tracking tag, anonymized, and sent to Google. It is then used to match against the Google account that your customer was logged into when they interacted with the ad. 

Benefits of Implementing Enhanced Conversions

  1. You can measure conversions that would not have been measured otherwise due to third-party cookie restrictions. 
  2. With more insights into what ads converted, you will be able to make better decisions when it comes to bids, budgets, and campaign management.
  3. Your reliance on third-party cookie tracking is alleviated. You use your first-party data to measure conversions which is your best bet in the future after third-party cookies are phased out.  

This is a privacy-safe way of future-proofing your business as you are collecting first-party data. It can improve conversion measurement hence making it easier to understand what keywords or campaigns are generating the best results.

Enhanced Conversions can also help more accurately measure the impact of YouTube. Video campaigns generally result in upper-funnel awareness and it can be hard to measure their performance because people do not directly make a purchase after watching your ad on YouTube. 

With Enhanced Conversions, Google gets access to your customer data which it can match against the log-in data of the customer who has viewed your YouTube ads. This can help you track conversions that resulted from YouTube.

After implementing Enhanced Conversions, advertisers report an average increase of 17.5% in measured conversions on YouTube. 

Who Can Use Enhanced Conversions?

Advertisers can implement Enhanced Conversions if they have sitewide tagging set up through Global Site Tag or Google Tag Manager. If you are importing a conversion goal from Analytics, you will not get the option to set up Enhanced Conversions. Also, this feature is in beta so not all accounts are eligible for it. 

How to Implement Enhanced Conversions in Shopify?

Before you implement Enhanced Conversions, please ensure that you have read Google’s Customer Data Policies and are compliant with them. 

There are 3 ways to implement Enhanced Conversions:

  1. Automatic
  2. Manual
  3. API

In this blog, we will discuss the manual method.

In your Google Ads account, go to Tools & Settings > Conversions.

Locate your primary purchase conversion action and click on it.

At the bottom, you will see ‘Enhanced Conversions’. Click on it and check ‘Turn on Enhanced Conversions’.

Then choose ‘Global Site Tag or Google Tag Manager’

You will be prompted to enter your URL so Google can check whether your website has a Google Tag. If you have more than one Global Site Tag or GTM tag on your website, you will be shown all of them and will have to pick the one that is relevant.

In ‘Confirm how you want to set up enhanced conversions’, click on the drop-down menu and choose ‘Edit Code’:

Now the next steps require you to have backend access to the Shopify store that you want to set up Enhanced Conversions for. This includes two steps:

  1. Edit your global site tag to allow Enhanced Conversions tracking.
  2. Edit your conversion tracking snippet in your ‘Additional Scripts’ to include enhanced conversion fields. 

We will first look at how to edit the Global Site Tag. Go to your Shopify store > Online Store > Themes. Click on the live theme and then look for theme.liquid:

Look for your Global Site Tag. It should be at the very top in the <head> section. 

Now, you only need to add “{‘allow_enhanced_conversions’: true}” to your global site tag. Here’s what your Global site tag would look like before you make any changes:

<!-- Global site tag (gtag.js) - Google Ads: 123456 -->
<script async src="https://www.googletagmanager.com/gtag/js?id=AW-123456"></script>
<script>
window.dataLayer = window.dataLayer || [];
function gtag(){dataLayer.push(arguments);}
gtag('js', new Date());
gtag('config', 'AW-123456');
</script>

After you edit the tag, this is what it should look like:

<!-- Global site tag (gtag.js) - Google Ads: 123456 -->
<script async src="https://www.googletagmanager.com/gtag/js?id=AW-123456"></script>
<script>
window.dataLayer = window.dataLayer || [];
function gtag(){dataLayer.push(arguments);}
gtag('js', new Date());
gtag('config','AW-123456', {'allow_enhanced_conversions':true});
</script>

For the second step, you first need to make sure that the thank-you page/page where your conversion tracking code fires contains at least one of the following fields:

  • Email (preferred)
  • Full name and address (first name, last name, street address, city, region, postal code, country)
  • [Optional] A phone number can also be provided along with an email or full name and address (but not by itself)

Since Shopify has the same checkout for its stores, you can use the same script that we have posted below.

In Shopify, locate Settings in the left panel and click on it. Then go to ‘Checkout’.

Scroll down to ‘Additional Scripts’ and look for your conversion tracking snippet.

Above your conversion tracking snippet, add the following code:

<script>
  var enhanced_conversion_data = {
    "first_name": "{{ checkout.billing_address.first_name }}",
    "last_name": "{{ checkout.billing_address.last_name }}",
    "home_address": {
      "street": "{{ checkout.billing_address.street }}",
      "city": "{{ checkout.billing_address.city }}",
      "region": "{{ checkout.billing_address.province }}",
      "postal_code": "{{ checkout.billing_address.zip }}",
      "country": "{{ checkout.billing_address.country_code }}"
    }
  }
if("{{ checkout.email }}"){
   enhanced_conversion_data.email = "{{ checkout.email }}";
}
if("{{ checkout.billing_address.phone }}"){
   enhanced_conversion_data.phone_number = "{{ checkout.billing_address.phone }}";
}
</script>

It can take up to 72 hours for your Google Ads account to show whether the implementation has been successful or not. To do so, go to Tools & Settings > Conversions > Diagnostics. Then look at the Status of Enhanced Conversions. 

If you have correctly implemented Enhanced Conversions, you should get the message that tells you if your implementation was successful.

That’s it. You are done implementing Enhanced Conversions. Questions? Comment below. You can also check out our blog on how to set up GA4 or our other blogs on Google Analytics to help you with measurement.