What is “conversion”?
By: Domagoj Kovač
Tags: Marketing, CPC, Digital Marketing, Conversion Rate, Conversion

Photo by Austin Distel on Unsplash

Conversion is defined as, “The point at which a recipient of a marketing message performs a desired action.” In other words, conversion is simply getting someone to respond to our call-to-action.

Getting someone to open an email is a conversion or having them click on the call-to-action link inside that email is another conversion. Going to the landing page and filling out a registration form to read our content is a conversion. And, of course, buying our product is the ultimate conversion.

For consumer marketers, conversion can be relatively fast and simple. A possible customer scans a QR code to get a coupon (that’s a conversion right there), and then they immediately go to the restaurant to get their free french fries with a burger and soft drink purchase (that’s the key conversion).

In the longer and more complex B2B sale, you want a steady series of small conversions. Engage with your lead nurturing email sends, engage on the website, interact with your social media efforts, and hopefully do a lot of these activities on a mobile device.

Why Do Conversions Matter?

Conversions matter because they make our business profitable. The ultimate conversion is a sale, but other conversions are valuable as well if they help you find leads and nurture them into paying customers. Even if you did not know it, or if you still do not fully understand conversions, they are valuable nonetheless.

The real question should be why tracking conversions matters. Tracking sales conversions is obviously important to know whether or not our business is profitable, but lesser conversions are helpful to track as well.

By tracking conversions, we can understand what interests your customers, what marketing tactics work, and where your marketing may fall short if users fail to convert. Tracking this information can help you adjust your website, marketing, and sales tactics to improve profitability.

Measuring efficiency

The efficacy of conversion is measured by the conversion rate: the number of customers who have completed a transaction divided by the total number of website visitors. Conversion rates for electronic storefronts are usually low. Conversion marketing can boost this number as well as online revenue and website traffic.

Conversion marketing attempts to solve low online conversions through optimized customer service, which requires a complex combination of personalized customer experience management, web analytics, and the use of customer feedback to contribute to process flow improvement and site design.

By focusing on improving site flow, online customer service channels, and online experience conversion marketing is commonly viewed as a long-term investment rather than a quick fix . Increased site traffic over the past 10 years has done little to increase overall conversion rates, so conversion marketing focuses not on driving additional traffic but converting existing traffic. It requires proactive engagement with consumers using real time analytics to determine if visitors are confused and show signs of abandoning the site; then developing the tools and messages to inform consumers about available products, and ultimately persuading them to convert online. Ideally, the customer would maintain a relationship post-sale through support or re-engagement campaigns. Conversion marketing affects all phases of the customer life-cycle, and several conversion marketing solutions are utilized to help ease the transition from one phase to the next.

Conversion rate

The conversion rate is the proportion of visitors to a website who take action to go beyond a casual content view or website visit, as a result of subtle or direct requests from marketers, advertisers, and content creators.

Successful conversions are defined differently by individual marketers, advertisers, and content creators. To online retailers, for example, a successful conversion may be defined as the sale of a product to a consumer whose interest in the item was initially sparked by clicking a banner advertisement. To content creators, a successful conversion may refer to a membership registration, newsletter subscription, software download, or other activity.

For websites that seek to generate offline responses, for example telephone calls or foot traffic to a store, measuring conversion rates can be difficult because a phone call or personal visit is not automatically traced to its source, such as the Yellow Pages, website, or referral.

Possible solutions include asking each caller or shopper how they heard about the business and using a toll-free number on the website that forwards to the existing line. For websites where the response occurs on the site itself, a conversion funnel can be set up in a site’s analytics package to track user behavior.

Conclusion

Marketing companies track conversions and measure conversion rates to track how a digital campaign performs. They use tactics to test and improve the campaign by changing the copy, images, layout, and more. If the CPC of an ad is too high, then the advertisement probably isn’t worth running and should be improved upon or scrapped.

Conversions and the data analyzing conversions are all used to better market your company or website to improve the bottom line.