How to Set Up Enhanced Conversions for Leads: A Simple Guide for Small Businesses

If most of your sales happen after a phone call, a quote or a meeting, Google Ads only sees the form fill. It never learns which leads turned into customers. Enhanced conversions for leads fixes that without making you track click IDs perfectly.

What it is, in plain words

Google describes enhanced conversions for leads as “an upgraded version of offline conversion import” that uses user-provided data (Google Ads Help). User-provided data means the details a person typed into your form, usually an email address or phone number.

It works in two halves:

1. When the lead arrives. Someone clicks your ad and fills in your form. The Google tag on your site sends Google a hashed copy of their email or phone. Hashed means scrambled into a fixed code with SHA-256, so the plain value isn’t sent.
2. When the lead becomes a sale. Days or weeks later, your CRM marks the lead as qualified or won. You import that conversion with the same email or phone. Google matches it to the form data and to signed-in Google accounts, and credits the ad.

Google lists the gains on the same page: more accurate reporting than standard offline import, a setup that holds up under stricter privacy rules, and support for engaged-view and cross-device conversions.

Web vs leads vs offline import

Three similar names are easy to mix up. Here’s the difference, based on Google’s About enhanced conversions page:

Feature	Where the sale happens	What links it to the ad
Enhanced conversions for web	On your website (a checkout, a booking)	Hashed customer data sent by the tag at the moment of conversion
Enhanced conversions for leads	Offline, after a website lead	Hashed email or phone from the form, matched to your later import
Offline conversion import (GCLID)	Offline, after a website lead	Only the Google Click ID you saved with the lead

The last row is the older method. It breaks whenever the GCLID is lost: a form that didn’t capture it, a visitor who declined cookies, a lead who came back days later through a bookmark. If you already upload GCLIDs, our guide to uploading offline conversions to Google Ads covers that path. Google recommends that new advertisers start with enhanced conversions for leads and that existing users upgrade (About offline conversion imports).

What changed in 2026

Many setup guides written before 2026 are now wrong in at least one step. These are the changes Google lists on its settings update page and file import page:

• Data Manager for files. For file uploads, enhanced conversions for leads only accepts Google Ads Data Manager files. The old upload template under Goals › Conversions › Uploads is now labeled legacy and can’t be used for leads data. Other routes are the Data Manager API and a Zapier connection.
• All sources at once (April 2026). Google Ads accepts user-provided data from website tags, Data Manager and API connections at the same time.
• One switch (June 2026). Enhanced conversions for web and for leads became a single on/off setting. If you had already accepted Google’s customer data terms, you were moved to the new setting automatically.
• API moved (June 15, 2026). Since June 15, 2026, these uploads go through the Data Manager API. The older Google Ads API only accepts setups that were already sending them between January and June 2026.

For a small business, the practical result is simple: use the Google tag on your forms, and use Data Manager for the import.

Before you start

Check these first. Each one takes minutes.

• Auto-tagging is on in Admin › Account settings (About auto-tagging). Google’s checklist asks for it.
• Your form asks for an email or phone number. Google’s tag setup page says the lead form must collect first-party customer data.
• Your CRM keeps the email and phone as typed. Don’t let a sync add prefixes or change the address. The import must match what the form captured.
• You know which stage counts. Google highly recommends the goal categories “Qualified lead” or “Converted lead”. Pick the CRM stage that matches, and make sure your CRM records the date and time it was reached.

Set it up in five steps

Step 1: Accept the terms and turn it on

Go to Goals › Settings. Under the customer data terms, select View terms, tick the box to accept them for your company and select Agree. If you work from a manager account, the terms must be accepted there (Google Ads Help). Then turn on enhanced conversions in the same settings (settings update).

Step 2: Set up the tag on your lead forms

The tag has to send the email or phone when the form is submitted. Google’s tag setup page offers three ways:

• Automatic. In your Google tag settings, turn on automatic collection for “Form interactions”. Then tell Google which boxes hold the email and phone by pasting a CSS selector for each (a short label you copy from your page with your browser’s Inspect tool). No code needed.
• A few lines of code. Forms from another company’s tool, or forms shown inside a box from another site, need a developer to add a few lines that pass the email or phone to the Google tag when the form is sent.
• Google Tag Manager. If your site uses Tag Manager, you add the form’s email or phone to your Google Ads tag there. Google has a separate guide for it.

Test it before you go on. Submit a test lead and use Tag Assistant to confirm the tag fires with user data.

If some visitors are in the EEA, the UK or Switzerland, Google’s EU user consent policy requires their consent before you collect and use their personal data for ads. Your cookie banner and consent setup must cover this; our guide to Consent Mode v2 for small businesses explains the basics.

Step 3: Create the conversion action

In Goals › Conversions › Summary, click + Create conversion action, choose Import, then CRMs, files, or other data sources and Track conversions from clicks. Choose the goal category, name it, and connect a data source now or later (Data Manager setup).

Google’s implementation checklist says to mark the new action as secondary for the first 2–3 weeks. Secondary actions are reported but don’t steer bidding, so a setup mistake can’t hurt your campaigns while you check it.

Step 4: Connect your data in Data Manager

The easiest route for a small business is a Google Sheet with a direct connection. Data Manager asks you to map each of your columns to a Google field: email, phone number, conversion date and time, and the GCLID if you have it. You can also connect a CRM such as HubSpot or Salesforce directly; the supported sources table has the full list.

CRM exports need some cleanup first: phones without country codes, dates in mixed formats, times without a time zone. The enhanced conversions for leads upload file builder turns an export into a Data Manager file with Google’s field names, phones in E.164 format (a plus sign, the country code, then the number) and full timestamps. Paste the result into your connected Google Sheet.

Each row needs a conversion time plus at least one match key: a GCLID, user-provided data, or a GBRAID or WBRAID (upgrade guide). Upload every lead that reached the stage, not only the ones you think came from ads. The checklist says this is required.

Step 5: Upload daily, then check

The checklist says daily uploads are strongly recommended. A scheduled Google Sheet connection handles that once it’s set up. Conversions matched on email or phone must be uploaded within 63 days, so don’t let the sheet sit for two months.

After 2–3 weeks, compare the new action’s conversions with your CRM, using the All conv. (by conv. time) column. When the numbers make sense, make the action primary.

Hashing and formatting the data

You don’t have to hash anything yourself. Google’s Data Manager data guide says Data Manager hashes the data for you with SHA-256. Unhashed data is often the safer choice for a small business, because Google also cleans it up the right way (lowercase, no extra spaces, standard phone format) before hashing.

If your company’s rules say personal data must be hashed before it leaves your systems, the format must be exact, or nothing will match. Google’s diagnostics page lists the rules:

• Before hashing, trim spaces at the start and end and convert to lowercase.
• Gmail addresses: remove the dots before @gmail.com and @googlemail.com.
• Phones: use E.164, for example +16505551234.
• Hash email, phone, first name, last name and street address with SHA-256.
• Don’t hash country, state, city or ZIP code.

One wrong step, such as hashing [email protected] before lowercasing it, produces a valid-looking hash that matches nobody. If your CRM or a developer made the hashes, test a few rows with the SHA-256 hash checker. It shows the cleaned-up value and the hash Google expects side by side, so you can see whether your system did the same.

Reading the diagnostics

Google rates your setup in the enhanced conversions for leads diagnostics report. Find it in Goals › Summary: hover over the action’s status and choose Diagnostics, or open the Diagnostics tab.

• Excellent: active and fully optimized.
• Good: active, with room to improve, such as adding the Google tag.
• Needs attention: active, but with errors such as missing information.
• Urgent: the setup isn’t active, for example the tag isn’t firing.

Alerts you may see, and what they usually mean:

• Tag is missing user-provided data. The form fires the tag, but the email or phone is empty. Check your CSS selectors or your tag variable.
• Importing limited user-provided data. Your import has GCLIDs but few emails or phones. Add them to every row.
• No user-provided data matches. The imported hashes don’t match what the tag captured. Often a clean-up mistake before hashing, or a CRM that changed the email.
• No attempted imports. Data Manager isn’t sending anything. Check the connection and any upload errors.

Many rows marked as “unknown clicks” in your upload results are normal. You are uploading every lead, and many of them didn’t come from an ad. Google says to check your setup only if nearly every conversion shows it.