Conversions vs events: What's the difference?
When it comes to tracking performance in digital marketing, conversions and events are two terms that often come up, but what’s the real difference? 🤔
Understanding these two metrics is key to fine-tuning your campaigns and seeing better results.
Let’s break it down 👇
What are conversions?
In simple terms, a conversion isn't the OG, it's the UG (the ultimate goal) of your marketing campaigns and everything you constantly work towards.
Whether it’s a sale, a form submission or a sign-up, conversions are the actions you want your users to take that directly contribute to your business goals. Think of conversions as the “finish line” of all your hard work and importantly, your marketing efforts.
But why do they matter?
Well, conversions measure your businesses growth and success. Without them, there’s no way to gauge if your marketing is delivering the results you need 🚀
What are events?
On the other hand, events are individual interactions or behaviours that users have with your website or landing page. These actions can help you understand how users are engaging with your site, but they don’t mean they’ve completed a conversion event (like a purchase or sign-up 🛍️).
But here’s the thing - events still matter!
They’re the building blocks of your conversions - think of them as the groundwork you need to lay to get them over the finish line.
By tracking events, you gain insights into exactly how your users are interacting with your site, which in turn helps you to optimize the specific actions that lead to conversions 🎯
Why you need both for a complete strategy
Conversions are the gold standard of measuring success, while events provide crucial data that can inform you on how to achieve conversions. If you’re tracking events properly, you can help to boost your own conversion rate by revealing opportunities for optimization - think of it as a hybrid conversion meets event circle of life.
If you’re seeing volumes of clicks on a specific product page (an event), but not many purchases (a conversion), it’s a good indication that something might be off. Perhaps the page load time is too slow or the CTA (call to action) isn’t compelling enough.
By optimizing these smaller events, you can work to improve the bigger conversion goal!
Common mistakes to avoid
Whilst both conversions and events are powerful, it’s easy to make mistakes that can hinder their effectiveness. Here’s a few to watch out for:
- Not defining clear goals: If you’ve not got well-defined conversion goals, you’re flying blind. It’s important to make sure you know exactly what you want users to do on your site, then set up goals around those actions.
- Overcomplicating your event tracking: Events are great, but tracking too many can quickly become confusing and overwhelming. Focus on tracking the most important user actions that give you the best insights into the conversion process 💭
- Neglecting optimization: If you’re not acting on the data that your conversions and events give you, you’re missing out on opportunities to refine and optimize both your site and campaigns. Regularly check in and update to keep things focused ✅
How to set up conversion tracking
Tracking individual conversions sounds simple, but it does require a structured (and slightly technical) approach. Here’s how to set up proper conversion tracking:
- Identify your specific key actions: What’s the most important action that a user can take on your website? For example, an eCommerce store might want to track every time someone completes a checkout.
- Set up your conversion goals: Tools like Google Analytics (or platforms like Hitprobe 👋) let you set specific goals that reflect your users key actions. By setting these goals, you can track when users complete them, giving you all the valuable data behind each action.
- Add tracking pixels: Whether its through Google Ads, Facebook or others platforms (like Hitprobe…yes, us again), adding pixels to your site to monitor when a conversion happens helps you to capture the final user actions that are valuable.
- Test & optimize: Continuously test your landing pages and CTAs, there’s always work to be done to increase conversion rates. By leveraging event data, you’ll be able to pinpoint where users get distracted or drop off in the process.
Leveraging events for optimization
Events are your secret weapon for improving both your website and marketing activities. Here’s our tips on how to put them to work:
- Track user interactions: From scrolling product pages, to clicking on images, every single user action is an event that could be tracked. These insights help you to pinpoint areas that need improving. For example, if you notice that volumes of users are clicking on products that are out of stock, you could add a notification to let them know when it’s back in stock again.
- Build event funnels: By tracking a series of user actions (such as visit > click > add to cart > purchase), you’ll be able to create funnels that allow you to see what success looks like, where users are dropping off, and where a little help to convert might be required.
- Optimize with A/B testing: By testing different elements of your site (like buttons of CTAs) with event data, you’ll be able to leverage the data to further optimize.
How conversions and events boost retargeting
They aren’t just helpful for understanding what’s working - they’re also key to supercharging your retargeting efforts ⚡
If a user takes a specific action (like adding an item to their cart) but doesn’t convert (i.e. completing the checkout process), you can use that event data to retarget them with specific, highly targeted ads. This ad type helps to bring back lost opportunities and push them closer to that ultimate conversion.
For example, if the cart remains full, but the checkout conversion doesn’t happen, you can retarget them with an ad reminding them of the item, maybe with a discount or free shipping to sweeten the deal 🛒
By retargeting users based on their own actions, you can increase the chances of turning those “almost conversions” into the real deal 💪
Conclusion: The power of combination
Conversions and events are like two sides of the same coin 🪙
One tracks your ultimate business goals, while the other gives you the insights (and data) to get there.
By using both, you’ll be able to understand the journey your users take, optimizing as you go, so you can boost your marketing performance 🚀
Whether you’re tracking sales, sign-ups, engagement or general user activity, you’ll want to make sure you’re maximizing the full power of conversations and events to level up your marketing strategy.
If you’re ready to take your conversion and event tracking to the next level, try Hitprobe today for smarter insights, better click fraud prevention, and enhanced tracking to maximize your marketing success.
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