What does tracking that bidding can trust look like?

It looks like a short list of primary conversion actions that each map to money, with everything else marked secondary. Smart Bidding optimizes toward whatever lands in the Conversions column. Google’s account-default goals decide what lands there: an action must be marked primary and sit in a goal that is an account default (or a campaign-specific goal) before it counts. Secondary actions are labeled “observe only” and appear in All conversions, not in bidding.

A common failure is not missing tracking but too much of it: a page view, a scroll, an add to cart and a purchase all marked primary, so the bidder chases the cheapest one.

Which conversion actions should be primary?

Make primary only the action closest to revenue that still happens often enough to learn from. Google’s counting options matter too: “Every” counts each conversion after an ad interaction and suits sales, while “One” counts a single conversion per ad click and suits leads.

Business model Primary action Keep secondary Counting
Ecommerce Purchase with transaction value Add to cart, begin checkout Every
Lead generation Qualified lead or closed sale imported from the CRM Raw form submit, phone click One
Subscription First paid conversion (or trial start if paid data is too thin) Account creation Every for payments, One for signups
Local service Booked appointment or qualified call Direction clicks, page views One

If a lead business only has raw form fills today, start with the form fill as primary, then switch to the imported qualified stage once uploads run reliably. Our guide on value-based bidding covers how to attach values to these actions.

How do enhanced conversions work as of October 2026?

Enhanced conversions add hashed first-party data to your existing conversions so Google can match more of them to signed-in users. Google describes the data as an email address, name, home address and/or phone number, normalized (trimmed and lowercased) and hashed with SHA256 before it is sent.

Three changes in 2026 matter, per Google’s settings update:

  • One setting. From June 2026, enhanced conversions for web and for leads are a single on/off setting. Existing users who had accepted the customer data terms were moved automatically. You can still opt out per conversion action.
  • Several sources at once. From April 2026, Google Ads accepts user-provided data from website tags, Data Manager and API connections at the same time, so you no longer pick one method.
  • A new upload route. 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.

To turn it on, you confirm that the Google Ads Data Processing Terms apply and that you follow Google’s customer data policies. Check that your privacy policy says you share this data.

How do you send offline sales and qualified leads back to Google Ads?

Capture the click ID at the form, store it with the lead, and upload the outcome with the same hashed email or phone the tag collected. Google’s enhanced conversions for leads page calls this an upgraded offline conversion import, and asks you to include GCLIDs whenever possible. GCLIDs are required if you do not collect user-provided data with a tag.

The click ID part follows Google’s GCLID setup: auto-tagging on, a hidden form field, and a script on every page that stores the GCLID in a cookie or local storage (respecting local cookie consent rules) and writes it into the form.

For the upload, Data Manager (Tools, then Data manager) connects a source such as BigQuery, HubSpot or a file, and sends it to a destination such as offline conversion import or enhanced conversions for leads. Google’s import guidelines set the hard limits:

  • Standard offline conversions uploaded more than 90 days after the last click are not imported.
  • Enhanced conversions for leads uploaded more than 63 days after the last click are not imported.
  • Imported conversions take about 3 hours to appear.
  • The same conversion is not imported twice; re-uploaded duplicates are removed.

Consent mode passes the visitor’s consent choices to Google tags through four parameters, per Google’s developer overview: ad_storage, analytics_storage, ad_user_data (consent to send user data to Google for advertising) and ad_personalization (consent for personalized advertising). The last two are the “v2” additions.

There are two implementations:

Basic Advanced
Tag loading Blocked until the visitor uses the banner Loads with consent defaulted to denied
Data without consent Nothing, not even the consent state Consent state and cookieless pings
Conversion modeling General model Advertiser-specific model

For traffic from the European Economic Area, Google requires advertisers to follow the EU user consent policy and pass consent signals, and warns that blocking tags until the banner is used means Google cannot verify consent choices, which may lead to data loss. Modeled conversions appear in the Conversions column once you meet the eligibility thresholds, which Google sets at 700 ad clicks over seven days per country and domain grouping. Which mode is right for you is a legal question as much as a technical one; decide it with counsel.

In what order should you set it up?

  1. Write down the conversion definitions: what counts as a lead, a qualified lead and a sale, and who confirms each.
  2. Install the Google tag sitewide and connect a consent management platform with consent mode v2.
  3. Create conversion actions, set counting, and mark only the revenue-closest action primary.
  4. Turn on enhanced conversions and confirm the data processing terms.
  5. Add GCLID capture to every lead form and store it in the CRM with the lead.
  6. Connect the CRM or warehouse in Data Manager and schedule daily uploads.
  7. Run new imported actions as secondary alongside the old primary until the numbers reconcile, then switch.
  8. Only then change bid strategies or scale budgets.

Pages matter here too: a form that drops the click ID breaks step 5. Our landing page guide covers form setup for paid traffic.

What do you do when tracking breaks?

Apply a data exclusion so Smart Bidding ignores the bad period. Exclusions work on click dates, so widen the range by your conversion delay: Google’s example excludes October 10 to 18 for an October 15 to 18 outage with a 5-day delay. Google recommends covering at least 90 percent of clicks tied to the bad data.

Three rules from the same page: do not remove an exclusion once applied, wait at least five days before backfilling for reporting, and remember exclusions are not supported in Hotel and Travel campaigns. Exclusions are for outages, not ordinary swings in performance.

How MSG approaches this

At MSG, tracking and conversion definitions come before scaling. We start by diagnosing what each conversion action really measures, then build the tag, consent, enhanced conversions and CRM import setup inside your own Google Ads account, so the data stays yours. Weekly reporting is about business outcomes, not platform numbers, and we say plainly where tracking is incomplete. This work sits in our measurement and Google Ads management services.

Sources

  1. Google Ads Help: About account-default conversion goals
  2. Google Ads Help: About conversion counting options
  3. Google Ads Help: About enhanced conversions
  4. Google Ads Help: Updates to your enhanced conversions settings
  5. Google Ads Help: About enhanced conversions for leads
  6. Google Ads Help: Set up offline conversions using Google Click ID (GCLID)
  7. Google Ads Help: Guidelines for importing offline conversions
  8. Google Ads Help: About Google Ads Data Manager
  9. Google tag platform: Consent mode overview
  10. Google Ads Help: Updates to consent mode for traffic in the European Economic Area
  11. Google Ads Help: About consent mode modeling
  12. Google Ads Help: Use data exclusions for conversion data outages

Platform features and policies change. This guide reflects the sources above as of October 7, 2026.