Track

Conversion tracking always starts with defining conversions.

What counts as a “conversion” depends entirely on what kind of digital edifice you’ve constructed for separating people from their money. Are you running an e-commerce shop? A CRM-powered lead generation machine? A subscription service? Each of these funnels treats conversions differently, tracks them differently, and — most annoyingly — breaks them differently.

Understanding these distinctions isn’t just theoretical navel-gazing. It determines:

• What you can actually track (browser-side events are easier to set up but easier to miss and are not as useful)
• How accurate your data is (server-side is more reliable but requires care to work well)
• How your attribution works (does your tracking setup attributes a server-side purchase back to the ad they clicked three weeks ago)
• Which platforms can optimize your campaigns (they really, really want that conversion data, and isn’t picky about where it comes from)

The modern solution, naturally, is to do both simultaneously, which we’ll tackle in a later chapter Connect, once you’ve buckled in.

For now, just remember: conversions are not a monolithic concept. They’re a spectrum of events occurring in different places, meaning different things, to different business models. Understanding which ones matter to your business is the difference between optimization and simply making numbers go up while your actual revenue does something entirely different.

And wouldn’t that be awkward?