Does knowing the difference between clicks and conversions get you little confused? ? Maybe as a new marketer it might. But for a more expert marketer this may seem really simple.
But wait!
Things are changing so fast that the basics can easily be lost, confused or ignored, whether intentionally or not. The difference between clicks and conversions is HUGE and is extremely important.
In days gone by, marketers mostly focused on clicks. Then they would give those people who clicked on something over to the sales division of the company and hope they get a conversion.
Nowadays, those two teams need to work together getting clicks and conversions more effectively. Getting leads who convert is the focus now.
Conversions are now way more important than clicks.
Why? Read on my friends!
So What’s The Difference Between Clicks and Conversions?
Clicks are just that.
You click on a button, link, image or tap a mobile screen, to go to the next step in the customer journey. It may be to go to a landing page or an optin form or to possibly even buy a product.
So a click is required to get to a conversion. Important to know! ?
The actual conversion happens when a visitor or customer lands on your site, (through the click) and takes the action you wanted them to take. This is when they ‘convert’ to a being a customer. Or they’ve become more engaged because they signed up for your freebie on your optin form. This is also a conversion, because now they are on your email list and have become a hot lead ?
If you’re a marketer and doing all the things to get someone to click on your links, etc, then you feel pretty great when one of your clicks turns into a conversion. You have been successful with your strategies! ?
Now, impressions are a different story. It only means someone ‘viewed’ your ad. But they didn’t click or do anything. Just looked at the ad. You can measure impressions, but it’s all done differently than clicks and conversions. So you have to do some research if this is a big piece of your KPIs.
You Can Measure Clicks And Conversions
The fun part is measuring your clicks and conversions. And understanding what it means. They are measured in two different ways.
You’ve heard of CTR (click-through-rate)? Wherever you place your ads, you can measure the CTR. It’s shown as a percentage. This measurement shows you how many people clicked on your link, ad, image, etc, to then be taken to a website or landing page.
The conversion rate tells you how many people completed the goal ? of buying something or filling out a form. It’s calculated by the total number of visitors that went to a specific place and then divided by the number of conversions.
It doesn’t matter what type of reporting you use, there will always be a field for clicks and one for conversions. These numbers will never be combined or considered interchangeable.
What Should You Be Measuring?
What you measure will always depend on your goals. And you will always change to which one you’ll pay more attention to.
Clicks are considered a vanity metric. But sometimes you want to keep a close eye on them because they can be so important for understanding your ads.
When you want to know your ROI (Return On Investment), you will then keep a closer watch on your conversions.
Clicks
Let’s say you are running a brand awareness campaign for example. This is when you want to know and measure the number of clicks you get. Anytime you want to direct traffic somewhere in your ad campaign, you’ll want to measure the clicks.
Another thing to remember is that the CTR for PPC ads on Facebook or Google influences an ads’ Quality Score or Relevance Score. If nobody clicks through then your score goes down, down, down, because the platforms’ algorithms will take that to mean nobody likes your ad. ?
How painful is that!
But it just means you have to go back to the drawing board and make some adjustments until people start clicking on that ad. If your score is low, just work to bump it up again.
Another purpose of the click-through-rate is to measure the ratio of clicks to impressions. So, generally, it means the higher the CTR the more effective the marketing campaign has been to bring people to your website.
Conversions
You want to track your conversions and which variables in your ad had the most conversions. You can change the headline, the image, or copy. But you need to track them one at a time, so you’ll know exactly where you got the most conversions.
Record the results from each test you run and compare them to one another. If you want to track conversions for a two week period, you have to note your benchmark from the previous two weeks. Then you can make a comparison.
You want to identify increases or decreases in your CTR, CPC, CPA, etc.
But you don’t want to test too many variables. It could be hard to keep track of too many changes. And be sure to track every time you did change something. If you don’t document everything it will be hard to pinpoint what did or did not work. By testing you can find the best targeting, ad copy and landing pages to get you the massive results you’re looking for.
There are several ways to keep track of conversions. One is with the Facebook Pixel Helper.
Here is what you can learn from the Facebook Pixel helper:
- Conversion tracking across devices. You will see how your customers are interacting on different devices before they convert.
- It will show ads to people most likely to convert and take your actions.
- It will create custom audiences automatically. Custom audiences are for people who take specific actions on your website.
- You’ll be able to create Lookalike Audiences where you know who your best customers are and you find more people who match them.
- Dynamic Ads are when you can automatically serve relevant ads on Facebook based on user behaviour.
- And audience insights will show you everything you want to know about the people who visit your website. Then you can create content that they will love.
Custom URL apps can help you track A/B tests within analytics platforms. Here’s what these tools can show you.
- Campaign source: Where did all those conversions come from? Was it Google, Facebook, email, etc?
- Campaign medium: What campaign medium was used? Was it CPC?
- Campaign name: Used to track a specific focus like a seasonal promotion.
- Campaign term: Can be used to track specific keywords.
- Campaign content: Tracks ad copy variations for example, that go to the same destination.
Clicks are a fun metric to watch, but if you want more ROI for your ads, you may want to put more focus on conversions.
Make improvements continually to your ads, copy, images, landing pages, optin forms, etc. If you have digital products, they may need tweaking occasionally as well.
Writing copy to resonate with your target audience is so important. And if you have digital products, like courses or ebooks, you want to cover your audience’s pain points. Testing ad copy will help you understand more about how to speak to your audience to get the conversions you want.
How are your clicks and conversions doing?