Conversion tracking
Measurement and data
Measurement and data
Conversion tracking makes the actions you care about measurable — an enquiry, purchase, phone call or download — so you know which channels and pages produce them.
Practically it is three things: deciding which actions count and roughly what they are worth, recording them as events (through tag management, the ad platform or server-side), and checking they arrive exactly once per action.
Without reliable conversion tracking you steer ads on clicks and visits, while bidding systems need conversions to learn. Server-side measurement and sending values make that steering more accurate.
Consent and privacy are part of it: without consent for statistics or advertising you may not measure everything, and numbers from different systems never match exactly because of attribution and counting differences.
Retest after every change to your site or forms. An edited form or a new thank-you screen is the most common cause of measurement silently stopping.
In practice
Counting everything as a conversion. If a newsletter signup, an email click and an enquiry all weigh the same, you optimise toward the easiest one.
Related terms
- ConversionA conversion is an action you defined as valuable: an enquiry, purchase, download or phone call. The conversion rate is the share of visitors who take it.
- Google Tag ManagerGoogle Tag Manager lets you manage tracking codes and pixels without changing your website every time.
- GA4GA4 is the current version of Google Analytics. Everything is recorded as an event, instead of pageviews with separate goals as in Universal Analytics.
- AttributionAttribution assigns the value of a conversion to the channels and touchpoints that preceded it.
- Consent ModeConsent Mode is how Google tags adapt their behaviour to a visitor's cookie choice, with modelled figures for those who decline.