What is a conversion?
A conversion is simply any action on your site that you have decided counts as a success. For a shop that is usually a purchase; for a service business it might be a form, a call or a booking.
You decide what counts
There is no universal list. A conversion is whatever matters to your business. The important thing is to define it clearly and consistently, because that definition drives both your reporting and how your ad platforms optimise.
Macro vs micro conversions
- Macro: the main goal, a sale or a qualified lead.
- Micro: smaller steps toward it, an add-to-cart, a newsletter signup, a pricing-page view.
Tracking a few micro conversions helps you see where people drop off, not just whether they finished.
Why the definition matters for tracking
In GA4 a conversion is an event you mark as a "key event"; in Google Ads and Meta it is a conversion action you configure. If those definitions do not match, or the event is not firing, your conversion tracking reports nonsense, and bad data means bad optimisation. Getting the definition and the tag right is the whole game.
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