What Is a Conversion?

In a nutshell

A conversion is the number of times the action you ultimately want from social media happens. The word means a change from one thing to another, and it counts the moment a viewer becomes a customer. Typical examples are a booking for a restaurant, a purchase for an online shop, and an inquiry or document request for a B2B company.

What to treat as a conversion

Conversions are not decided by social networks; your company decides them. Actions that connect directly to sales are the easiest to understand, but in industries where the path from social media to purchase is long, you may set an earlier action instead.

Note that Google Analytics calls the events it counts as results "key events" (About key events). The wording on screen differs, but the idea is the same.

Measuring results from social media

What social media screens show stops at impressions, reactions and link clicks. Bookings and purchases beyond that are counted on your own website or booking system. To do that, the basic step is to add UTM parameters to your links so you can tell which post on which network a visitor came from. The steps are explained in Measuring results with UTM and short links.

Because a conversion is the goal figure itself, it is often placed at the very top of your KPIs.

Conversions are small in number, so it works better to look at them over a longer period, such as one month. Comparing differences by season and campaign gives you more of a clue about what to change next than reacting to small weekly ups and downs.

In SNS TOWN

When you turn a URL in the body into a short link in the composer, it directs visitors to a destination with the network's name as utm_source and social as utm_medium. In your website analytics, you can count the results of people who came from social media separately.