So you’ve configured everything and the numbers are flowing in. Does this mean you can simply point at a number and declare, “Aha! This is precisely how much we’ve made from our ad spend”? Sometimes yes, but usually — and this is where things get complicated — absolutely not.
Every time conversion value (or, in plain English, sales revenue from ads) gets attributed to a particular campaign within a specific time period, someone, somewhere, has made a choice. Very often this choice isn’t explicit — it’s something that the developers of an ad platform have decided for you, or that an analyst building your custom report has quietly slipped in while you weren’t looking. The resulting number might suggest your campaign is either spectacularly successful or catastrophically disastrous. But without understanding how it’s calculated and what’s actually beneath that seemingly innocent figure, you’ll never know which.
This chapter focuses on the different dimensions in which conversions can be calculated — because yes, there are multiple ways to slice the data behind a single number, and some of them might surprise you.