What is reported as a “conversion” within the Marketing Overview?

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For almost every marketing platforms, there are many different ways to configure conversion tracking, and many different standard actions that can be tracked as conversions. There are also many opportunities to create custom conversions, tracking more obscure or business-specific actions. While we still encourage you to track conversions on all levels that you find actionable, Source Medium has a more opinionated view on what should be considered a conversion within the reporting context of paid marketing.

Within the Marketing Overview dashboard, the only action Source Medium considers a conversion is when a platform reports a purchase of goods from your business. The reason you’re paying money is to actually acquire a customer (e.g. generating new orders), and not just to generate add-to-carts, it’s important to only include the conversions that are meant to report purchases on your site. This action can be called many different things depending on the platform (e.g. purchase vs. sale vs. payment etc.), and can be configured in many different ways — e.g. Bing reports “Goals” which can then be configured to track different actions as conversions etc.

Below are our platform-specific definitions for what is counted as a Conversion within Source Medium’s Marketing Overview dashboard