Full Answer

Standard Google Ads conversion tracking relies on a cookie set when someone clicks an ad and a tag that fires on the confirmation page. If the cookie expires, the browser blocks it, or the customer switches devices between click and purchase, the conversion is lost. Enhanced Conversions adds a second signal: hashed customer identifiers sent at conversion time. Google matches these hashes against its own logged-in user graph to recover conversions that cookie-based tracking drops.

For WooCommerce, the data source is the checkout form. The billing email, first name, last name, phone number, and address are hashed with SHA-256 before leaving the browser or server, then sent to Google alongside the conversion tag payload. Google never receives the raw data — only the one-way hash — and uses it solely for attribution matching.

The June 2026 merge of Enhanced Conversions for Web and Enhanced Conversions for Leads into a single toggle broke many WooCommerce setups silently. The migration required stores to have accepted Google's customer data terms in the Ads account, and most plugin-based configurations never triggered that acceptance step. A Seresa audit found 67% of WooCommerce Enhanced Conversions setups now fail validation after the merge. Server-side implementations like Transmute Engine handle the hashed data submission automatically, passing the merged-toggle requirements without manual reconfiguration. Related: What broke when Google merged Enhanced Conversions.