Google Ads Enhanced Conversions vs GCLID; What's the Difference?

Tracking offline sales conversions coming in to your Google Ad Campaign is the best conversion data you can get into your Google Ad Campaign for lead gen campaigns. Instead of optimizing a campaign to increase leads and lower cost per lead, you're able to optimize the campaign to increase your return on ad spend. That can truly be a game changer for your Google Ad Campaign.

In the past, if you wanted to track offline sales conversions on your Google Ad Lead Gen Campaign, you had to collect the gclid in a hidden form field to pass along to your CRM. Of course, this is only for leads coming in through form submissions. To track offline sales conversions from calls, you'd just collect the phone number the lead called in from and use that as the unique identifier instead of gclid.

Now that Google Ads has released "Enhanced Conversions" you're probably wondering what the difference is and which one you should use. They can both work depending on your situation but here are the main differences:

  1. Enhanced Conversions tracking is based on the user's Google Account, so it is able to track across devices (mobile and desktop) so long as the user is logged into their Google Account on both devices. If they're not logged into a Google Account, Enhanced Conversions will not work.
  2. Enhanced Conversions is only tracking form submissions and purchases (in the case of ecommerce), so you'd still have to set up offline conversion tracking for calls the traditional way.
  3. With Enhanced Conversions, you don't have to modify your web form to collect the gclid in a hidden form field. The set up is handled via Google Tag Manager and the unique indentifier is the user's email address. That's how Google connects the dots instead of using gclid.
  4. With Enhanced Conversions, if you're wanting to track offline sales conversions, you have to upload the leads that turned to offline sales manually in Google Ads. With the gclid method, you can automate the process using this Zapier.

How To Setup Google Ad Conversion Tracking

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