Enhanced Conversions User Data Quality
Your GTM container has Enhanced Conversions enabled on one or more Google Ads conversion tags, but the user data being collected is incomplete or improperly hashed. Either email is missing, phone and address are both absent (you need at least one), or the email is being passed unhashed instead of SHA-256. Google Ads silently drops or downgrades these hits, and the conversion match rate is far lower than the team expects.
Why It Matters
Enhanced Conversions improves attribution by sending hashed user data (email, phone, address) alongside the conversion event. Google matches that data against the signed-in user pool on Google's side to recover conversions that would otherwise be lost to cookie loss, ITP, or consent denial. The match works when the data is present (at minimum email; ideally email plus phone or address), hashed (SHA-256, normalized to lowercase and trimmed), and coming from the actual form or order object rather than a placeholder. Most broken implementations fail one of those criteria: email passed in plaintext because the developer didn't realize Google needs SHA-256, phone missing because the form never collected it, or address fields sent but not normalized (mixed case, leading spaces, formatted phone numbers with parentheses). Each one breaks the match and Google quietly drops the enhancement. The critical severity here reflects two things at once: regulatory exposure (sending plaintext PII to Google is a GDPR problem before it's a measurement problem) and lost attribution (Enhanced Conversions can recover 5 to 15 percent of otherwise-unattributed conversions, and a broken implementation captures none of that).
How To Fix It
- Open the AdLint details and list each Enhanced Conversions tag and its missing or malformed fields.
- Confirm the source data: email is required, plus phone or address (ideally both).
- Hash each field with SHA-256 before passing it to the tag. Email and phone need to be lowercased and trimmed first; phone needs to be normalized to E.164 format (+15551234567). Address fields need to be lowercased and stripped of punctuation.
- Verify in GTM Preview that the payload sent to Google Ads contains hashed values, not plaintext. The hash should be a 64-character hex string.
- Check the Enhanced Conversions diagnostic panel in Google Ads after 24 to 48 hours. The match rate should rise above the baseline within one reporting cycle.
Example
Required: hashed email (SHA-256, lowercase, trimmed)
Recommended: hashed phone (E.164) and hashed address (lowercased)
Never: plaintext PII in the conversion request.This GTM container has Enhanced Conversions tags configured for Google Ads but the user data collection has quality issues. Per Google's Enhanced Conversions documentation, the feature requires SHA-256 hashed email plus at least one of phone or address, with all values normalized (lowercased, trimmed, phone in E.164). Incomplete or unhashed payloads cause Google to silently drop or downgrade the enhancement, eliminating the 5 to 15 percent recoverable conversion lift Enhanced Conversions is meant to deliver and creating regulatory exposure where plaintext PII is sent. Fix: collect email plus phone or address from the form or order object, hash each field with SHA-256 after normalization, verify the payload in GTM Preview, and monitor the match rate in the Google Ads Enhanced Conversions diagnostic panel. Source: support.google.com/google-ads/answer/9888656.
Drop this paragraph into your client deliverable. Sources back to the canonical platform documentation linked below.
References
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