What is a conversion?

A Conversion is an action that is counted when someone interacts with an ad. The specific action, also known as a ‘conversion event’, is defined by the business. For example, it might be buying something, signing up for a newsletter, or filling out and submitting a form to attend a webinar. Conversions are sometimes also called ‘acquisitions’ or ‘actions’.

Conversions occur when a user performs a desired action in response to a call to action (CTA) placed in an ad creative, offer, or push notification. What the action is varies depending on the campaign and the associated business objectives.

Why are conversions important?

Marketers measure conversion rates to assess campaign or advertising channel performance, or the impact of a change to the user experience or advertising strategy. 

On mobile, an app can track conversions by calculating the percentage of users who have completed a desired action within the app or by navigating to a mobile website from the app. Mobile conversions often include things like in-app purchases, in-app signups, and other app-prompted actions. 

For CTV, conversions can be trickier to attribute, but they are often measured by counting view-through conversions, which is a measure of the proportion of people who watched a whole ad on a CTV device and then completed a desired action such as visiting a website, purchasing an item, or signing up for emails or text alerts. 

In all cases, tracking and measuring conversions is a crucial part of ensuring marketing efforts pay off – whether that’s through better user acquisition and engagement, improved ROAS and ARPDAU, or optimization of other marketing tactics.