What is a Conversion?
The word "Conversion" can be tricky to define in. We will start with the general concept for what conversions are in this space.
In the context of lead generation, a conversion typically refers to the action taken by a potential customer or prospect that signifies their interest or engagement with a product, service, or brand. This action can vary depending on the specific goals of a lead generation campaign but often includes activities such as:
Filling out a Form: This could be a contact form on a website, a subscription form for a newsletter, or a registration form for a webinar or event.
Signing up for a Free Trial or Demo: Potential leads might convert by signing up for a free trial of a product or service or requesting a demo to learn more about it.
Making a Purchase: In some cases, a conversion might refer to a direct sale, where a lead becomes a paying customer.
Downloading a Resource: This could include downloading an eBook, whitepaper, case study, or any other type of content that provides value to the lead.
Engaging with Content: Actions such as watching a video, reading a blog post, or interacting with social media posts might also be considered conversions if they indicate interest and engagement.
Requesting a Quote: In industries such as insurance or real estate, a conversion might involve requesting a quote or consultation.
Clicking on a Call-to-Action (CTA): Clicking on a CTA button to learn more about a product or service or to sign up for a newsletter can also be considered a conversion.
In essence, a conversion in lead generation is any action that moves a potential lead further along the sales funnel and indicates a willingness to engage with a brand or take the next step in the buyer's journey. Tracking and optimizing conversions are essential aspects of lead generation strategies, as they help businesses identify which marketing efforts are most effective in attracting and nurturing leads.
What is a PINGTREE Conversion?
While conversions in Pingtree can, and typically will, align with one of the examples mentioned above, the way in which it's applied may be different.
Inside of Pingtree, there are a number of system events as well as events that can be created custom, tailored to your campaign. (This is further explained in the preceding event management articles.) You have the ability to enable one of those system events OR a custom event as your "Conversion Event".
What does this mean though?
Great question - When creating a campaign, you will typically have an overall goal in mind. You may have a target profit margin you're trying to hit, or a bottom line revenue goal. You may just be looking to generate more volume of quality traffic to your form.
In Pingtree, your Conversion Event is going to based on that primary purpose of your campaign itself.
Example:
Scenario 1:
Consider a scenario in which you are running a personal loan campaign. In said campaign, you have a landing page and form flow you built in Pingtree. You are bringing in lead traffic from affiliates and media sources.
In this scenario, these leads, which pass the qualification standards you've set and submits the form, they are then then "sold" to your company's call center to be dialed out on directly. The term "sold" is used to show that the lead data successfully made it to the endpoint i.e. your CRM/Dialer.
When one of these leads enrolls in your company's loan program, you have an event postback structured in your CRM to fire back to Pingtree with an event called "Lead Enrolled"
In this scenario, you may want to enable this "Lead Enrolled" event as your campaign's conversion event as getting the lead to enroll is ultimately what your company would consider as a conversion.
Scenario 2:
NOW consider that you have a separate campaign and offer running concurrently. This campaign is for home services which is a completely different vertical than your personal loans campaign.
In this second campaign, you also have a landing page and form flow you've built in Pingtree however it's geared towards the home services vertical. You are still generating lead traffic from both affiliates and media sources alike. You have contracted with numerous buyers who will purchase your lead traffic if qualified.
After a lead flows through your form and hits submit, it's "sold" to a buyer. This is the last piece of data you receive about this particular lead.
In this scenario, you may want to attribute a system event, "Base Form Sold" as your conversion event for this campaign.
Result:
While both campaigns experienced success in reference to the lead that went through their offer, the overall goal and outcome was different. One was focused around leads that eventually enrolled in a program while the other only focused on meeting qualifications to be sold to a buyer.
Scenario 1 had an offline event fired which would be considered a conversion while in Scenario 2, that conversion event was fired as soon as the buyer purchased that lead.
Purpose of a PINGTREE Conversion?
Now that you understand WHAT a Pingtree conversion is and how the campaign goals should align with the event you assign as your conversion event, you may still be wondering, WHY DOES ANY OF THIS MATTER!
Simply put, this matters because when you enable that conversion event toggle next to the event, you've told the Pingtree system, that this event is the baseline on how to calculate your performance metrics and KPI's such as your conversion rate. This, used cohesively alongside revenue and other factors will factor into how and where you spend your marketing dollars.
Additional SOP's for PINGTREE Conversion?
When designating an event as a conversion event, there is a lot of data and metrics that this setting impacts. As a result, here are a few quick tips to keep in mind:
Your campaign should typically only have ONE event toggled as a conversion event. Conversion events should be the controlled variable in your campaign and enabling multiple events as a conversion can skew the data and impact validity.
Your conversion event can be the same event that revenue is generated on, but it doesn't have to be. In some verticals, your revenue may not be collected for months after the lead passed through your campaign. In these cases, your conversion event may not be attributed with revenue due to how it would affect the immediate performance analysis of your data.
There can be numerous revenue streams in a single campaign while still only having a single conversion event. A common example would be decline monetization via click listing offers. This revenue, while a great way to monetize on unqualified traffic, would not necessarily be the primary focus of every campaign.
What is an Affiliate Conversion?
You may have noticed another column in your event manager labeled "Affiliate Conversion Event".
The purpose of this feature also coincides with reasoning for your primary conversion events. When you working with affiliates and publishers, they may want see the quality of the lead traffic they're delivering.
The performance metric which traffic partners consider a qualified lead may be different than what you consider a conversion for your campaign.