Full Answer

Tracking WooCommerce purchases in Google Ads requires connecting your store's order completion events to Google's conversion measurement system, and the implementation method directly impacts how much revenue Google Ads can see and optimise against.

The basic setup involves two pieces of information from your Google Ads account: the Conversion ID and the Conversion Label. Enter these in your WooCommerce tracking plugin's Google Ads configuration section. When a customer completes a purchase, the plugin fires a conversion event containing the order value, currency code, and transaction ID.

Enhanced Conversions adds a layer of first-party data matching. In addition to the conversion event data, the plugin hashes the customer's email address, phone number, and billing address using SHA256 and includes this data in the conversion payload. Google matches this hashed data against its signed-in user graph, recovering attribution for conversions where the original gclid cookie has expired.

The delivery method matters as much as the data. Browser-side conversion tracking using the gtag.js snippet depends on JavaScript executing in the visitor's browser. If the visitor uses an ad blocker or Safari with strict tracking prevention, the conversion script may never fire. Server-side delivery eliminates this dependency by transmitting the conversion data from your WordPress server directly to the Google Ads API.

For Smart Bidding campaigns, the combination of Enhanced Conversions and server-side delivery provides the most complete conversion data possible, giving Google's algorithms the signal density they need to optimise bids effectively across all browser environments.