Google Ads: Enhanced conversions for apartment lead tracking

Here at REACH, we’re dedicated to staying on top of marketing trends. We work closely with our development team and partners to offer a best-in-class digital marketing experience that delivers real results. We also aim to keep our clients informed on industry news and trends. With that in mind, let’s review enhanced conversions for Google Ads.  

If you’re running any sort of PPC ads with Google, then you’re likely hearing about the importance of setting up enhanced conversions.

If you don’t know what enhanced conversions are, this article is for you. Also, if you’re working with us as an agency, you may not realize what’s happening in the background and why Google is pushing for adoption of this critical Ads feature. Here’s the skinny.

Some history 

Google first introduced enhanced conversions in May 2021. As the public became increasingly concerned about how their personal data was being used, Google sought to develop new strategies to help advertisers gain deeper insights into consumer behavior, improve the accuracy of their conversion tracking and fine-tune ad optimization efforts, without sacrificing privacy.  

In May 2023, Google announced that they would begin to move away from third-party cookies in January 2024. This expedited the importance of defining other avenues to measure and improve advertising efforts.

Enhanced conversions are a piece of Google’s response to delivering ad value while respecting consumer privacy concerns. Google is encouraging ad accounts to adopt enhanced conversions to improve the accuracy of conversion measurement and provide cleaner, more reliable data for its machine learning algorithms.

With greater accuracy, bidding strategies become much more powerful. Additionally, enhanced conversions can help us better understand cross-channel attribution and how your advertising channels perform together.

If your goal is to find the optimal marketing mix for a given property, then adding enhanced conversions to your marketing strategy is an important feature for filling in the gaps.  

Keep reading to find out how this works, or go back and read “PPC advertising for apartments” if you feel like you’d benefit from a refresher on general pay-per-click concepts.

How enhanced conversions work

There are two types of enhanced conversions for Google Ads:

• Enhanced conversions for web
• Enhanced conversions for leads

Both features rely on hashed data, thus protecting individual privacy. What is hashed data? In Google Ads, hashed data is a coded version of customer data that has been converted into a random series of numbers and letters. Hashing is used to protect private customer information.

Enhanced conversions matches data from your conversion tracking tags with that of Google accounts. The data used in the matching process can include name, email, address and phone number. Enhanced conversions uses a specific hashing algorithm to ensure this personally identifiable information isn’t available aside from the intended purpose. 

The hashed data is effective to help recover conversions data that may be lost due to consumer cookie choices or due to the conversion happening offline.   

Enhanced conversions for web

Enhanced conversions for web rely on Google receiving hashed data and marrying it with data from users that are signed in to their Google accounts. As users navigate through your website, they will ideally choose to connect with you through a form on your website. Hashed data from these forms is shared with Google to enable a deeper understanding of a website’s audience cohort.

The implementation of this feature necessitates updates in Google Global Site Tag on your website or through Google Tag Manager. Applied bidding strategies then have more data to refine target audiences and display to more relevant prospects. It enhances the experience for your audience and improves your return from ads.

Google is targeting a 5-17% conversion uplift for accounts using enhanced conversions for web.  

Enhanced conversions for leads

Enhanced conversions for leads take the conversion data a step further by utilizing data from farther along in the funnel to refine audience targeting. With this feature, we’re relying on hashed data from a CRM system where the conversion action is completed offline.

An example in apartment marketing would be to count the application or a prospect tour in your PPC conversions. This also requires programming updates to work effectively.

Google is placing even more expectation and weight on enhanced conversions for leads. It’s estimating a revenue lift of over 10% for accounts using this feature.  

Benefits of enhanced conversions

The data derived from both enhanced conversion features allows better bid optimization and the ability to create custom audiences for advertising.

Enhanced conversions benefits include:

• More accurate cross-device conversion tracking
• Better attribution modeling and bidding
• More detailed data through Google Signals association

When it comes to creating audiences, enhanced conversions are a powerful tool for helping advertisers deliver relevant ads to prospects. 

Why are we so excited about enhanced conversions?  

We worked closely with our development team and our Google reps to make sure we could utilize these critical features for the benefit of our clients. We are proud to share that we use both enhanced conversions for web and enhanced conversions for leads for our clients. To qualify, you must be a CRM client using our PPC services.

The combination of both types of enhanced conversions empowers us to deliver quality traffic that converts to clients like you, without any extra effort on your part. The addition of enhanced conversions also allows us to further improve the ad experience for prospects. Keep your eyes peeled for a future case study on the impact of these updates.