Why might an advertiser use enhanced conversions for leads?

To measure sales that close offline, like over the phone, from leads that started on the website. The hashed lead data links the sale back to the ad.

Is enhanced conversions safe for customer data?

The data is hashed with SHA256 before it is sent, so Google receives a code, not the plain email. Google says it only reports privacy-safe conversions.

What is enhanced CPC?

A different thing. Enhanced CPC is about bidding. Enhanced conversions is about measurement: it helps Google count more of your sales.

Google Ads Glossary

Enhanced Conversions in Google Ads

What enhanced conversions do, how the hashing works, what changed in 2026, and why a store's bidding gets better when more sales are counted.

Written and reviewed by Christopher Krassnig

Published 8 October 2026Last checked 8 October 2026

Definition

Enhanced conversions is a Google Ads feature that makes conversion tracking more accurate. When someone buys, your tag sends hashed customer data, like an email address, to Google. Google matches it to signed-in accounts that saw your ads. The data is hashed with SHA256 first, so Google never gets the plain email.

Also called: enhanced conversions for web, enhanced conversions for leads

How Enhanced Conversions Work

When a customer buys on your site, you often have their email, name, address or phone number. Google says this data "can be captured in your conversion tracking tags, hashed, sent to Google in its hashed form, and then used to enhance your conversion measurement."

Hashing turns the email into a long code that cannot be turned back. Google uses "a secure one-way hashing algorithm called SHA256". Google then compares that code with signed-in Google accounts that engaged with your ads, and counts the sale against the ad.

If you hash the data yourself, Google's rules are: remove spaces at the start and end, make it lowercase, format phone numbers to the E.164 standard, remove dots before the domain in gmail.com and googlemail.com addresses, and hash with hex SHA256.

Enhanced Conversions for Web vs for Leads

Google describes two kinds:

Enhanced conversions for web compared with enhanced conversions for leads
Kind	For	Improves
For web	Sales and events that happen on your website.	Measurement of online conversions.
For leads	Sales that happen off the website, from a website lead.	Measurement of offline sales that came from a website lead.

Online stores almost always want enhanced conversions for web. Leads is for businesses that close the sale later, by phone or in person.

What Changed in 2026

Two changes from Google's help pages. First, "enhanced conversions for web and leads are now combined into a single on/off setting." Google says that from April 2026 it accepts user-provided data from website tags, Data Manager and API connections, and existing users are moved to the new setting automatically.

Second, from June 15, 2026, offline conversion imports and enhanced conversions for leads uploads moved to the Data Manager API and are blocked in the Google Ads API. If an app or script uploads your leads, check it uses the Data Manager API.

Why It Matters for a Store

Bidding runs on the conversions it can see. If some sales go uncounted, Smart Bidding thinks some campaigns do worse than they do, and it bids them down. Enhanced conversions helps more of your real sales show up in Google Ads.

It does not fix a broken setup. If your purchase tag fires twice, or never fires, enhanced conversions sends bad data with extra detail. ZenoX Media wrote up one common case, the Shopify Google Ads pixel double-counting fix, and our PPC tracking answer covers the basics.

Store example

Example: A Shopify Store Turns It On

Made-up numbers, to show the method. A Shopify store sees 100 orders a week in Shopify but about 80 purchases in Google Ads. Some of the gap is normal, because not every order came from an ad.

It turns on enhanced conversions in the Google tag, so the order email is hashed and sent with each purchase. It checks the enhanced conversions diagnostics report in Google Ads to make sure the data arrives in the right format.

A few weeks later, Google Ads reports more of the store's ad-driven orders. The store does not change bids that week. It lets the bid strategy learn from the fuller numbers first.

Common Mistakes

Turning it on over a broken tag
Enhanced conversions adds detail to the conversions you already send. Fix double counting or missing purchases first.
Hashing the data the wrong way
Google's rules: trim spaces, lowercase, E.164 phone numbers, then hex SHA256. Skip a step and nothing matches.
Using the old upload path for leads
From June 15, 2026, lead uploads go through the Data Manager API, not the Google Ads API.
Changing bids the same week
When reported conversions jump because measurement improved, give bidding time to learn before you judge it.

Questions People Ask

You set it up through the Google tag or Google Tag Manager, or send the data through Data Manager or the API. Since April 2026, Google has one on/off setting for both web and leads.

Related Terms

Google's Own Pages We Quoted

Every rule, limit and size on this page comes from these pages, read on 8 October 2026. Google changes them, so check the page itself before you act.

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