What is a Conversion?
Conversion is the generic term used for an action or acquisition completed on a CPA campaign. Basically, if you are trying to track something like how many sales an online ad has generated, a conversion is when the thing that you want to happen, happens.
The term comes from the idea of converting a potential customer into an actual customer. The word sale isn’t used, as it can mean anything that an ad was trying to get a user to do. This includes a sign-up for an email list, a purchase of a product or a download of an app.
There are words that specifically refer to the different types (eg in the previous examples: lead, sale, download), but conversion is the umbrella phrase used.
Technical Information
You often need a Conversion Pixel in place for tracking purposes. This can often be a bit fiddly because it requires putting code directly on to a site’s confirmation page to work.
Tracking isn’t as simple as seeing how many people clicked on an ad and then immediately made a purchase either, unfortunately. This would be unfair to the publisher hosting the ad. This is because many people are convinced by ads to make purchases (for example). They do not always make the purchase at that exact moment, however.
This is why Post-Impression and Post-Click Windows are usually agreed upon between the publisher and advertiser. These refer to the amount of time after an ad is seen or clicked on (respectively) that an ad still counts as having made that conversion.
Of course, many users will see an ad multiple times on multiple sites before making a purchase. It wouldn’t be fair for the advertiser to have to pay multiple times for a single sale. The rule of thumb is that the last website an ad was clicked on or seen usually gets paid. This attribution model is known as “Last Click”.
Therefore advertisers usually get the final say on how many each publisher has actually made. They do this by putting all the data they have about where every lead, sale, download etc have come from through a process called de-duplication.
Publishers can try and increase how likely ads on their site(s) are to generate leads, sales, downloads etc by optimising towards CR. However, this is often quite a fraught process, due to the nature of CPA campaigns.
Types of Conversion – Infographic
Other names for Conversion (synonyms)
Acquisition, Action
Not to be confused with
Version
Summary
Find out more
- Conversion Rate Definition
- Conversion Rate Calculator
- CPA Calculator
- CPA Definition
- Conversion Tracking
- Buying Ads on a CPA Basis
- Selling Ads on a CPA Basis