What are conversions?
Conversions are actions of a visitor or client that is beneficial for your business. There are 4 main types of conversions:
- Website actions: online purchases, sign-up, E-books downloads and other actions that customers complete on your website.
- Phone calls: calls directly from your ads or after clicking on your ads.
- App actions: Installs or sales occurring in one of your mobile apps.
- Offline conversions: physical store visits and purchases.
Why should you use conversions?
Once you have conversions being setup, you can start optimising your overall advertising spend towards them. You will have a clear idea of which keyword or ad is bringing the most value to your business.
Moreover, platforms like Google & Facebook have invested big amounts of money into the development of smart algorithms, which are optimising your bidding automatically towards a given conversion when correctly setup.
How to setup conversions?
Each platform has a different tag or code snippet that you will have to copy on your website. For Google you can use the Google Analytics tag or the Google Ads tag, whether for Facebook, we speak about the Facebook pixel.
Once you have the right tags on your website, you need to create the conversions. This happens in the different ad platforms and can be complicated if you are not really tech savvy. The best solution you have is to ask one of your tech colleagues or use solutions like Shown.
How to use conversions
This is the most important question you should ask yourself. People tend to use only that one conversion bringing money to their business (purchase or a booking), but this is not the right approach.
When you start with online advertising, you should think about the right strategy to adopt. From how to tease new prospects to get interested in your service or product, to how you can make them book or purchase that later. Depending on where the prospects are in your business discovery, you might want to optimize for other (soft) conversions.
A soft conversion you could consider is ‘sing-ups’. Getting emails from prospects is easier than a final purchase. Another option could be ‘time spent on your site’. These conversions are meant for new prospects and will be cheaper and faster to obtain.
Once you have these valuable prospects, you can then email them or target them with another advertising campaign, this time aiming for final purchases or bookings.
There are many strategies to consider. If you don’t have a lot of experience, we would recommend you to get help from experts.
Conclusion
Having the right conversions setup is key if you want high-performing online advertising. However, it is not only about the setup, but also how you use the different conversions. Think about how your potential customers behave and aim for the right conversions at the right moment in their online buying journey.
