What are Conversions & Attributions? 🍋 🧍

In advertising lingo we often use the terms 'conversions' and 'attributions’. But what do they mean?

To explain the terms I'll use an analogy.

Imagine you are running a lemonade stand.

You put up signs around the neighbourhood (like digital ads) to get people to come and buy your lemonade. When someone sees your sign and buys lemonade right away, that's an ad conversion — you can easily say, “This sign made them buy.”

Now, sometimes people see your sign, but they don’t buy lemonade right away. They might think about it and come back the next day to buy some.

In this case, it can be challenging to determine if the sale happened because of your sign or for another reason. This is the tricky part of "attribution" whether or not your ad ultimately resulted in a sale. In digital advertising, we try to track the attributions of those who have seen the ad and made a purchase, but it’s not always perfect.

For example, sometimes, people will see your sign, tell their friends, and a week later, their friend comes to buy. That’s an eventual sale that’s harder to track [attribute] directly back to the ad. We know the ad helped, but we can’t always prove exactly when or how much.

So, while conversions are the ultimate goal for every business, it’s important to consider the effects of second or even third-impact attributions that ads can have. These attributions can typically be measured through metrics like clicks, traffic, or views.

In short, ad conversions are the immediate sales we can track, while some sales happen later and aren’t as easy to connect to the original ad.