Conversion
DefinitionA conversion is the action you want people to take as a result of your campaign, such as a purchase, a submitted form or a phone call. The ad platform counts one when it receives a signal from the tracking code on your website or from your sales system.
How it works
Conversions fall into two groups: primary and secondary. A primary conversion is the one that brings the business money or a customer’s contact details: a purchase, an enquiry, a booked call. Secondary conversions, such as adding to basket or viewing the pricing page, show the path towards that goal. A campaign optimised for a conversion learns to find people who complete it, so whatever you set as the goal decides who the system goes looking for.
- Enquiries
- 45
- ÷Clicks
- 1,500
- =Conversion rate
- 3%
Figures are illustrative.
What it means for you
CPA and ROAS are both calculated from the number of conversions, and budget decisions are built on them. If your tracking counts conversions twice or misses some, every figure downstream is wrong and the system optimises your campaign on bad data. That’s why conversion tracking is the first thing we check with every new client.
From our accounts
In accounts we take over, we often find the conversion set to a click on the phone number or a visit to the contact page. The platform then reports dozens of conversions a month while enquiries barely move. Once the goal is changed to a submitted form or a call lasting over a minute, there are fewer conversions, but each one is a real lead.
We set up conversion tracking in GA4, Google Ads and Meta Ads so that platform figures can be checked against your actual sales.
Web analytics