Enhanced Conversions for Shopify: Complete Setup Guide

Enhanced Conversions is Google's solution to a growing problem: cookies are becoming unreliable, and traditional conversion tracking is losing data because of it.

Here's how they work. When a customer completes a purchase on your Shopify store, Enhanced Conversions capture their email address (and optionally their phone number, name, or mailing address), run it through SHA-256 hashing — which makes the data irreversible and unreadable — and send that hash to Google alongside the standard conversion tag. Google then matches this hash against its own database of signed-in users to verify the conversion actually happened.

Think of it as a backup identification system. If the cookie works, great — Google uses it. If the cookie was blocked, expired, or deleted, Google can still attribute the conversion through the hashed email match. You're not adding new tracking; you're making your existing tracking more resilient.

Two years ago, Enhanced Conversions were a nice-to-have optimization. Today, they're critical infrastructure for any Shopify store running Google Ads. The reason is simple: the tracking environment has fundamentally changed, and cookie-only setups are bleeding data.

Consider what's happened just in the past 18 months:

Enhanced Conversions sidestep all of these issues. They don't rely on cookies persisting, they don't depend on JavaScript tracking scripts loading, and the hashed data is already available at checkout because Shopify collects customer email as part of every order.

The numbers tell the story clearly: merchants who enable Enhanced Conversions typically see a 15-20% increase in measured conversions. These aren't new sales — they're sales that were always happening but weren't being counted. And that matters enormously for Smart Bidding, because every uncounted conversion is a signal Google's algorithm never receives.

Before setting up Enhanced Conversions, make sure you have these in place:

• Working Google Ads conversion tracking — Enhanced Conversions supplement your existing setup, they don't replace it
• Customer email collection at checkout — this is standard on Shopify, so you should already have this
• Admin access to both Google Ads and your Shopify store
• Google Tag Manager access (only needed for the manual setup method)

This approach gives you full control over the implementation but requires comfort with GTM variables and data layer configuration. If you're already managing your conversion tracking through GTM, adding Enhanced Conversions is a natural extension of that setup.

If the GTM approach sounds like more complexity than you want to manage, an automated setup handles everything for you. This is the approach we recommend for most Shopify stores because it eliminates the two biggest risks of manual Enhanced Conversions: misconfigured hashing and maintenance when Shopify updates.

With ScaleUp, Enhanced Conversions are enabled automatically as part of the standard installation. There's no separate configuration step — the app captures customer email at checkout, hashes it properly using SHA-256, and includes it with every conversion event sent to Google.

After enabling Enhanced Conversions, you need to verify they're actually functioning. Unlike basic conversion tracking, there's no immediate "it's working" indicator — Google needs a few days of data before the status updates. Here's how to confirm everything is set up correctly.