Google Ads Data Strength Best Practices Updated

Oct 13, 2026 - 7:05 am 0 — by
Filed Under Google Ads

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Google has revamped its Data Strength Best Practices help document with much greater emphasis on sending more first-party data and identifiers, using Data Manager correctly, adopting AI-powered campaigns, and supporting its recommendations with performance statistics. It is a big update to the document.

You can compare the live version to the archived version and see how much more detail Google added to this document. You can see the old version was more of a short, high-level overview that is now updated into a detailed implementation guide.

The old document offered general advice about improving measurement and ROI. The new version includes quantified claims, including:

  • 14% uplift in observed conversions and up to 7% lower cost per acquisition for advertisers upgrading to Google Tag Gateway.
  • 8% incremental return on ad spend (ROAS) on Google Search campaigns, on average, for advertisers bidding to conversion value who implement Enhanced Conversions.
  • 27% more unique converting users, on average, for Search campaigns using Smart Bidding Exploration.
  • 5.3% conversion uplift for advertisers applying Customer Match list signals.

The new document identifies the signals advertisers should pass to improve measurement:

  • Hashed email addresses and phone numbers
  • IP addresses
  • Transaction IDs
  • Google Click ID (GCLID)
  • Session attributes and URL parameters (GBRAID/WBRAID).

The new document also included AI Max for Search campaigns, Demand Gen and more details about the existing Smart Bidding, Performance Max, lookalike segments, and optimized targeting.

The new page adds a personalized Data Manager checklist, diagnostics for identifying setup errors, guidance on avoiding duplicate Analytics data connections, and instructions for using a common schema with the Data Manager API.

And much more - so it probably is recommended you scan through the updated Data Strength Best Practices help document.

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