Google Ads is about to score your data.

What did Google actually announce?

Two things, and only one of them is aimed at a business your size.

The first is about how your own data reaches Google. Google says it is directly integrating Data Manager into Google Analytics and Display and Video 360, to help you manage and activate your first-party data across tools, and that advertisers who connect offline and app data to Data Manager see an average 26% increase in incremental ROAS. Google also says it is launching enhanced conversions in both products, to securely match customer data and improve ad relevance, and that advertisers using them see an average 11% increase in Search conversions compared with standard conversion imports.

Hold both figures loosely. They are Google's own, averaged across every advertiser it has and footnoted without the working.

The second is a new number in the ads interface. Google says it is introducing a new Data Strength Uplift Metric in Google Ads, and that the metric calculates the additional conversions recovered by your first-party data setup to help quantify impact.

What is the Data Strength Uplift Metric counting?

Recovered is the word to sit with. Google says the metric calculates the additional conversions recovered by your first-party data setup, and recovered means sales that were already happening and simply were not being counted. Nothing there promises you more customers. It promises a fuller count of the ones you had.

That difference matters, because the fuller count is what the bidding runs on. If half your jobs arrive by phone and none of those calls reach the account, the bidding steers towards the half it can see.

The figure Google puts against the plumbing side is this: Google says advertisers who build their data strength with Google tag gateway observe on average a 14% conversion uplift. Read the hedges: it is an average, the word is observe, and Google tag gateway is a serving change made by whoever runs your site, not a switch in the ads account.

What the announcement lacks is a method. Google has not said how the metric works out what would have happened without your data, so our read is to watch it month to month rather than treat it as an audited figure.

Why should a small advertiser care about any of this?

Because the gap between what you sell and what Google can see is wider for a local business than for almost anybody else.

An online shop has the easy version: somebody clicks, buys, and the thank-you page fires a conversion with a value on it. A barber, a plumber, a tour operator or a restaurant in Kent has a different shape. The click becomes a phone call, the call becomes a quote, the quote is accepted on Thursday, and the money changes hands a fortnight later on a card machine that has never heard of Google Ads.

Every one of those steps is a signal the bidding is running without, and it is getting harder rather than easier, because more of the enquiry now happens away from your website. We wrote recently about Google's AI phoning local businesses on a customer's behalf, and a robot ringing to ask about availability leaves no trace in any report you open.

Our post on the AI report in Search Console was about a number Google started showing you. This one runs the other way: the numbers only you can hand over.

What is your business not sending back?

Before anybody touches a setting, write down the gaps. On the accounts we look after, the same handful keep turning up.

• Calls that turned into work. The enquiry is a click, the job is a line in a diary, and nothing joins the two.
• Counter and card sales. Somebody searched, drove over, bought in person, and the account recorded a visit to a directions page.
• Bookings that cancelled or never arrived. Counted as wins, worth nothing, and they pull the bidding towards whatever produced them.
• The real value rather than the deposit. A holding fee and the finished job look identical to a conversion that carries no value.
• The customer who came back. Repeat visits are where local businesses make their money, and almost nobody sends them anywhere.

None of it is exotic. Most already sits in a booking system, a diary or a till report somebody exports for the accountant.

Who has to do this work, you or your web person?

Three jobs, and they land on three different desks.

The pipe. Google says the Data Manager API is now universal, and that it is based on the IAB Tech Lab's Event and Conversions API standard, giving a unified, secure setup to connect, manage and activate audiences and measurement across major ad platforms. The standard is the interesting half, not the API: if your booking supplier builds to an industry format once, that plumbing has a chance of feeding more than one ad platform. It is a conversation with them, not with your ads person.

The tag. As we understand it, Google tag gateway is a first-party serving route for the Google tag, which makes it a hosting job rather than anything in the ads interface. On a managed platform, ask whether they support it.

The watching. Google says new built-in diagnostics in Data Manager can automatically identify and address data issues before they impact campaign performance. That is the one line in the announcement written for people without an analytics team. Broken conversion tracking is the quietest failure in a small account: no error, just fewer sales reported than you had, month after month.

What we are doing for clients this month

• Opening each ads account we manage and writing down, in plain words, what a conversion currently means in it. Often the honest answer is a form submission and nothing else.
• Checking whether call tracking exists, and whether the calls it records reach the ads account rather than a separate dashboard nobody signs into.
• Putting one question to every booking or till supplier: can you send completed bookings and sales back to Google, and what does that take.
• Looking for the Data Strength Uplift Metric at the next check-in on each account, and writing down what it says the first time it appears.
• Switching on the Data Manager diagnostics wherever they show up, and treating what they flag as a job list rather than a scolding.

No website is being rebuilt for this. It is connection work, and most of it is one email to a supplier. If you would rather hand it over, that is what we do.

What you should do this week

1. Open your conversion actions in Google Ads and write down what each one records. If the list is shorter than the ways people actually buy from you, you have found the gap.
2. Count how many of last month's sales began with somebody ringing you. If it is most of them, call tracking is the first project rather than the last.
3. Ask your booking or till supplier whether completed bookings and sales can be sent back to Google, and get the answer in writing.
4. Ask whoever hosts your website whether Google tag gateway is something they support.
5. Look in Google Ads for the Data Strength Uplift Metric. If it has not reached your account, put a note in the diary for a month's time.
6. Decide in advance what you would do with a number telling you your setup recovered conversions. For some businesses the answer is nothing, and it is cheaper to know that first.

Three objections, answered

"I spend a few hundred a month, this is for the big advertisers." Half of it is. Conversion data is not gated by budget though, and a small budget spent against a fuller picture of what sells is the same argument as a large one, with less room to waste.

"These are Google's numbers about Google's own products." They are, and we have kept the label attached on purpose. An average across a whole advertiser base tells you a direction, not your outcome. Look at what is being compared, too: Google says the average 11% increase in Search conversions is measured against standard conversion imports, so both sides of that comparison were already sending data back. It is a gap in match quality, not the gap between doing this and doing nothing.

"My booking system cannot do any of this." Very possibly true, and for small suppliers it will stay true a while. The move is not to change systems in a hurry, it is to ask the question and register the demand, because a standard only becomes real when customers ask for it. Until then, sending last month's finished jobs back by hand is dull and it works.

The verdict

The metric is the smallest part of this announcement and the most useful. A figure in the interface saying what your data connections recovered turns an argument we have every year into something clients can look at.

The work it points at has not changed and was never glamorous. Know what a conversion means in your account. Get calls, counter sales and finished jobs back into it. Ask your suppliers the one question that unlocks the rest. Do that and the metric will have something to report. Skip it and it will report nothing, accurately.