What is conversion?

What is conversion in marketing?

The definition of conversion in marketing is when a user performs a desired action in response to a call-to-action (CTA) placed in an ad, offer, or push notification. What that conversion action is varies depending on the campaign and the mobile marketer’s objectives. An app conversion, also known as a conversion event, could be a download, install, sign-up, or purchase, among other actions.

Marketers measure their app conversion to assess the performance of a campaign or advertising channel or the impact of a change to the user experience. An app can track conversions by calculating its conversion rate, or the percentage of users who have completed a desired action.

Why is conversion important to mobile marketers?

Key performance indicators (KPIs) associated with conversion are key to assessing the effectiveness of marketing campaigns. You can only determine your return on ad spend (ROAS) if you measure how many users convert as a cause of that spend. Conversion rate is particularly important when running mobile user acquisition campaigns because it can measure the success of each campaign. It can also be used to set return on investment (ROI) expectations when scaling a campaign.

When establishing your KPIs it’s important to look at the conversion events that align with your company’s goals. For example, a high conversion rate for installs is a positive outcome, but that won’t necessarily translate into greater revenue from in-app purchases. In this case, the conversion rate for installs and in-app purchases both need to be considered in your analysis to learn how to move users from install to purchase.

Conversion rates are also an effective way of:

• Comparing and contrasting the performance of multiple advertising channels.
• Identifying valuable users by measuring events further down the funnel. This information can then be fed back into the funnel to aid segmentation, targeting, and optimization of campaign performance.
• Spotting issues with an app’s user experience (UX) and highlighting areas for improvement. For example, a lower-than-expected conversion rate may indicate that users are having problems signing in.
• Testing development changes. For example, if the onboarding process is overhauled and conversion significantly improves, this is an indication that the onboarding was a critical step in the customer journey.

What is an example of conversion?

There isn’t a single conversion rate that can be used to define success across the mobile advertising industry, but research into industry benchmarks and vertical-specific conversion expectations can help. You can use this research to compare these figures with the performance of your in-house advertising campaigns across a selection of channels and advertisers.

However, here are a few examples of conversion events across verticals, with each example getting further down the funnel.

Education: A user subscribes to the app’s newsletter.

Utility: A user downloads and installs the app for the first time.

E-commerce: A user adds three items to their cart.

Banking: A user requests a call with a financial advisor.

Gaming: A user purchases virtual currency to use in-game.

Conversion and Adjust

Adjust offers several solutions to help businesses measure and compare campaign conversion rates effectively. Our conversion tracking tools help marketers identify where conversions come from. Adjust also helps businesses to integrate event tracking into their mobile apps. This helps marketers and advertisers track actions–such as account registrations–which can be contrasted with the overall performance of an advertising campaign.

Learn more about Datascape, Adjust’s powerful all-in-one measurement tool.