Why is Google pushing Enhanced Conversions? And what should B2B marketers do?
Like many advertisers, we recently received these reminders from Google Ads to set up Enhanced Conversions before October 2024👇
And it’s about time!
As B2B marketers obsessed with data, we are delighted to see Google pushing this more aggressively, especially Google Enhanced Conversions for leads.
Google Enhanced Conversion enables marketers to track both conversions taking place on the site (Enhanced Conversions for web) and conversions taking place ‘offline’ (Enhanced Conversions for leads, formerly Offline Conversions).
The distinction is important.
For the B2B marketer who is dealing with a 192-day customer journey, Enhanced Conversions for leads is way more interesting than for web, as most B2B marketers are already likely using better (more B2B-focused) web tracking solutions than what Google’s Enhanced Conversions for web offers.
Enhanced Conversions for leads, on the other hand, enables you to feed accurate pipeline data back through to Google Ads and set up automated bidding, essentially enabling you to train the Google Ads AI to target leads that buy your product.
In this post, we’re going to unpack what the good, the bad and the perfect setup is for Google Enhanced Converions.
Contents:
What is Google Enhanced Conversions?
The good: Google Enhanced Conversions helps B2B marketers track conversions
The bad: There are better web tracking alternatives for B2B marketers
The perfect: Combine B2B-focused tracking with Google
Final word
Enhanced Conversions for existing Dreamdata customers
What is Google Enhanced Conversions?
“Enhanced conversions is a feature that can improve the accuracy of your conversion measurement and unlock more powerful bidding… by sending hashed first party conversion data from your website to Google in a privacy safe way.” Google
Specifically, Google Enhanced Conversions is a story of two parts:
Enhanced Conversions for web - to track conversion events happening on the website. For example, newsletter sign ups, content downloads or demo requests.
Enhanced Conversions for leads (formerly Google Offline Conversions) - the B2B-focused component that helps track conversion events happening outside of the site, e.g. through sales meetings, by pulling CRM data, and sending this data back to the Google Ads campaign manager.
The good: Google Enhanced Conversions helps B2B marketers track conversions
The idea behind Enhanced Conversion is to ensure advertisers are able to accurately track and measure conversions, and from this optimize marketing efforts - against a backdrop of third-party cookie deprecation.
Here’s how Google puts the challenge:
“Technology updates, such as Google Chrome’s plans to deprecate third-party cookies in 2024, are changing the ways you reach audiences and measure results. Build a strong foundation for measuring your ads with enhanced conversions. Delaying could impact the performance of your ads, including your conversion measurement.”
Ominous warning, but true.
For the B2B marketer, tracking and measuring down-funnel conversions is essential to optimizing and scaling marketing efforts.
You want to know that the user who clicked the ad and went on to book the demo, was also the one who purchased the product those weeks or months later.
The long and complex nature of the B2B customer journey, where, buying is done by multiple stakeholders across multiple channels (including ‘offline’ meets), over multiple months, makes tying these actions to outcomes particularly difficult.
And with third-party cookies under scrutiny, this has become even harder to do in a privacy-safe way. We cover third-party cookie deprecation (and what to do) in this post →
Google Enhanced Conversions helps close this gap between action and outcome. And the benefits speak for themselves.
The Benefits of Google Enhanced Conversions
1. Accurately report on performance
Improved tracking means better attribution and understanding of which campaigns and keywords are driving actual business results.
2. Better optimization of campaigns
Deeper insights into the performance of your ads, allowing you to allocate your budget more effectively to the keywords, ads, and campaigns that are driving the most business value.
3. Activate automated bidding
Enhanced Conversions (for leads) allows you to feed accurate down-funnel conversion data into Google’s automated bidding strategies. For B2B companies, where lead quality is fundamental to ad performance, this can lead to more effective bid adjustments to win most-likely-to-close leads.
This feature effectively enables you to close the revenue loop by automating data collection, analytics, and optimization. (more on this in the ‘Perfect’ section below)
4. Operate in a data-safe way
Enhanced Conversions comply with data privacy standards. They use hashing techniques to ensure that any customer data shared is secure, which is crucial for B2B companies dealing with sensitive business information.
The bad: there are better alternatives for B2B first-party web tracking
The benefits of Enhanced Conversion are clear.
Yet, when we assess the two-component features separately the benefits for the B2B marketer become less even.
While Google Enhanced Conversions for leads (formerly Google Offline Conversions) is a game changer for B2B marketers, Google’s Enhanced Conversions for web is much less convincing.
In fact, it is not the best option out there to take care of B2B first-party tracking.
B2B first-party web tracking
First-party data comprises insights directly collected from your owned channels - like website visits, content downloads, and webinar registrations.
In the B2B context, this extends to tracking multiple users from the same account, allowing you to gain a comprehensive view of account intent.
And for this, there are alternative (free) web tracking solutions that offer a better tracking package for B2Bs than Enhanced Conversions for web. Solutions which operate account-based tracking, include intent data tracking, and are easy to set up.
For instance, the Dreamdata Analytics Script 2.0 is designed as a one-stop solution for your first-party tracking. Right out of the box, it includes:
Custom tracking of your users’ most important activities, including page views and conversions.
Form tracking automatically adapted to a wide range of form types and submission methods.
First-party intent tracking with anonymous IP-to-company resolution.
Hybrid intent with built-in options to integrate other intent sources, such as 6Sense and Clearbit.
Cookieless Account Analytics offering a first-party company tracking fallback when users decline cookies.
You can read more about Dreamdata’s Analytics Script here →
B2B analytics & multi-touch attribution for more accurate performance measurement
On the measurement and analytics side of things too, there are better off-the-shelf-solutions available that measure not just the impact of your Google Ads, but all other marketing activities too.
Through multi-touch attribution on all the touches on the B2B customer journey you’re able to move out of the Google universe and easily compare performance across channels, e.g. Google Ads vs LinkedIn Ads, or sources, e.g. between your Organic and Paid Ads.
Out-of-the-box data cleaning and modelling for hassle-free quality data.
Additionally, with off-the-shelf tools like Dreamdata, you are assured that all the data from all those multi-channel, multi-stakeholder journeys, is maintained and modelled constantly without having to rely on internal tech resources.
Not to mention implementing a fully automated process that doesn’t require manual uploads of data to the Google Ads campaign manager.
The perfect: sending holistic B2B first-party tracking data back to Google AI with Google Enhanced Conversions for leads
The good news is that you can have the best of both worlds.
Google allows marketers to feed pipeline conversion data back to Google Ads through Enhanced Conversions for leads regardless of the tracking solution you’re using.
This means that you can have in place robust end-to-end customer journey tracking, plus all the additional perks of off-the-shelf B2B solutions, to train the Google Ads AI on what high-quality leads look like.
With Google Enhanced Conversions, the algorithms will constantly learn from this campaign performance data, refining and improving bid adjustments over time, based on real pipeline data.
Additionally, a few of these tools, like Dreamdata, offer complete automation through a simple click-and-connect integration with Google Enhanced Conversions for leads. Enabling B2B marketers to automatically and continually feed pipeline data straight back to Google Ads.
This continuous learning ensures that B2B marketers' campaigns become more effective and efficient as more data is collected and analysed.
We cover all the details of our integration with Google Enhanced Conversions for leads here →
Final word
So, there you have it! Google Enhanced Conversions is a bit of a double-edged sword for B2B marketers.
While the web tracking component is a bit lackluster, Enhanced Conversions for leads is an absolute game-changer.
It’s like giving Google Ads a backstage pass to your sales pipeline, allowing it to learn and optimize campaigns based on your closed deals.
But hold on, don’t rush off to set it up just yet.
To truly unleash the power of Enhanced Conversions for leads, you need a solid B2B web tracking solution in your corner, something like Dreamdata, that captures the entire customer journey and feeds that quality data straight back to Google.
So, if you’re ready to take your B2B marketing game to the next level, it’s time to embrace the dynamic duo of B2B web tracking and Google Enhanced Conversions for leads. It’s a match made in marketing heaven, and your bottom line will thank you for it!
For existing Dreamdata customers
If you're an existing Dreamdata customer and using our Google Offline Conversions, you don't need to move a finger. Your data will continue flowing daily.
If you’re a Dreamdata customer and not using Enhanced Conversions yet, here’s the documentation for you to easily set it up
Read more about our Google Enhanced Conversions integration here →
