Conversion

A conversion is any desired action that a user takes on your website or in response to your marketing. It could be a purchase, a newsletter signup, a form submission, a phone call, a download, or even watching a video. The specific action that counts as a 'conversion' depends entirely on your business goals and what stage of the customer journey you're measuring.

Conversions are typically categorised as macro or micro. Macro conversions are the big wins - the actions that directly generate revenue or leads, like completing a purchase or requesting a sales demo. Micro conversions are the smaller steps that indicate progress, like adding an item to a cart, viewing a pricing page, or subscribing to an email list. Both types are important because micro conversions often predict future macro conversions.

Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) is the discipline of systematically increasing the percentage of visitors who take the desired action. It involves understanding user behaviour through analytics and heatmaps, forming hypotheses about what changes could improve performance, running A/B tests to validate those hypotheses, and iterating based on results. Even small improvements in conversion rate can have massive revenue impact.

Here's the math that makes CRO so powerful: if your site gets 100,000 visitors a month and converts at 2%, that's 2,000 conversions. Increasing your conversion rate to 2.5% - a seemingly modest improvement - gives you 2,500 conversions. That's a 25% revenue increase with zero additional traffic spend.