Tag PilotConversions
Conversions
Not all events are equally important. It is valuable to analyse the complete sales funnel, to understand why people drop off at each stage and find ways to improve engagement. But from an advertising perspective, the event that matters most is the one that means a visitor or a lead became a paying customer.
That’s why conversions are a separate category, a subset of events. Marking an event as a conversion says: this event is special. It is also why conversion events should carry more data than other events. Every additional data point gives analytics and advertising platforms a better chance of working out who converted and how to find more visitors like them.
Enhanced Conversions
As privacy regulations and tools limit cookies, they are no longer a single, reliable way of identifying a user. Without identifiers, a tracked conversion only says that somebody bought something; there is no way to tell whether that person came from a paid ad. As a result, the advertising platform cannot use that information to optimise how ads are served.
To prevent this, technologies such as Enhanced Conversions (from Google Ads) and Advanced Matching (from Meta) were introduced. They let online businesses send customer information in a privacy-friendly way, to improve the chances of linking a conversion to a specific person.
Privacy is protected by hashing. Hashing is a one-way transformation of human-readable text, such as an email address, into something that looks like a random string. The key point is that the same input always produces exactly the same hash.
It is like a fingerprint (note that “fingerprinting” is a separate tracking technique, only related to hashing in this context). The same person always leaves the same fingerprints, so you can tell that the same person touched several objects, but you cannot tell who that person is from the fingerprints alone, unless you already have those fingerprints in a database.
That’s exactly how Enhanced Conversions and Advanced Matching work. Advertising platforms have extensive databases of their users’ information, so when a conversion arrives with those hashes, they compare them with their own records, match them to individual people, and adjust how campaigns are served.