Why your booking site might slow down when analytics are enabled

If your booking site feels slow when you turn on Google Analytics with Google Ads, you're not alone. We know why it happens and how to fix it — without losing your conversion tracking. No technical knowledge required. You just need access to your Google Ads account. 

Why is your site is freezing?

You set up Google Analytics and Google Ads to track how many people book or sign up. Everything works fine. But then your customers start complaining that when they click "Add to Basket", the page freezes for a few seconds. It's frustrating - your customers think your site is broken, and you start wondering if you should turn off tracking altogether.

Here's the good news: your site is fine. The problem is a conflict between Google's Ad tracking code and how our platform works. And it's fixable.

What is Enhanced Conversions?

Google Ads has a feature called Enhanced Conversions that's turned on by default. When someone submits any form on your site (like clicking "Add to Basket") , Google's tracking code tries to find their email address so it can match them better in Google Ads and show them more relevant ads later.

Sounds harmless, right? The problem is how Google's code searches for that email. It uses an automated process that's a bit too aggressive - it scans everything on your form, looking for email-shaped text. On our platform, there's a lot of "stuff" on the background of every page that looks email-shaped but isn't. Google's code ends up checking millions of combinations before it gives up. During that time, your customer's browser just sits there, frozen, waiting for the search to finish.

Why does this happen on our website?

Most websites don't have this problem. But booking platforms, inclusing our 'myonlinebooking' platform, has a much more technical setup that triggers it. Without getting too technical: our platform stores invisible information on every page to keep track of what's happening behind the scenes, every page of the site is seen as a form  . This information is very long and looks kind of like it could contain an email address - but it doesn't.

When Google's Enhanced Conversions feature scans the form, it hits this invisible information and gets confused. It spends 2–3 seconds checking if it might be an email, fails every time, and finally gives up. Your customer is stuck waiting during that whole time.

Does this sound like your problem?

If all of these are true for you, then this is your issue:

1. You're using the myonlinebooking platform (Merac's microsite booking platform)
2. You have Google Analytics turned on
3. You have Google Ads conversion tracking turned on
4. Your customers experience 2–3 second freezes when submitting forms

If any of these isn't true, this probably isn't your problem.

How to fix it

Go to your Google Ads account and turn off Enhanced Conversions. That's it. You're done.

If you want to be slightly more fancy about it, you can switch Enhanced Conversions to "Manual" mode instead of turning it off completely. But for most people, just turning it off is the easiest solution.

You will still track conversions completely.