A conversion is any action you want a user to take: a purchase, a form submission, a phone call or a newsletter sign-up. The conversion rate is the percentage of visitors who took that action. For example, 1,000 visits and 20 orders give a conversion rate of 2%.
Primary conversions and micro-conversions
It’s worth distinguishing your primary conversion, such as a sale or a quote request, from micro-conversions: adding to basket, viewing the price list, clicking the phone number. Micro-conversions show where you lose people along the way in your marketing funnel. If lots of people add a product to their basket but few go on to buy, look at the delivery cost, the form or the payment options before you blame the ad.
Why does a campaign get traffic but no conversions?
In most of the audits we carry out, the culprit is the website: slow loading on mobile, a form with ten fields, no price, no trust signals. An ad can bring in the right person, but it’s the website that closes the sale. We cover this in more detail in our article Why marketing campaigns fail. Another frequent cause is badly configured tracking, which makes campaigns look as if they have ‘no’ conversions even though customers are calling.
