We’ve recently been revisiting the value that we associate to conversion events like phone calls or form completions. Clients with online purchase events are easily handled, once the technical work is done. For most clients though, associating a value to each conversion event can be exceedingly difficult to get right. For every client, it’s worth exploring. We often find ourselves simply offering a calculation to a client that depicts how many of each conversion type we’d expect to see for every $1K in ad spend, for example. What is a conversion, after all? For a typical client, in Google alone, we might have:

– Clicks to Call (Google Maps, website)
– Calls placed (as tracked by Google Ads call numbers)
– Calls over a certain duration (deemed a “conversion” in Google Ads)
– Contact forms
– Application, Tour, or Calendar bookings
– Purchase or Subscription

Consider this little problem from a different perspective; it’s less important that you know exactly what a conversion is worth, and more important that you know what each conversion is worth in relation to the other conversions. We often use a scale of 1 to 100 (1-1,000 for larger ticket events). In that scale, with your most valuable conversion being worth “100”, where do the other conversions fall on that scale? Maybe a phone call is worth 1/2 what an online form is worth, and you might ignore calls that come from branded SEM traffic as those are a unique circumstance. Maybe calls over 2 or 3 minutes are worth 100, while shorter calls are worth less. You might also have things like newsletter sign-ups, coupons or white paper downloads, or even sessions over a certain duration. Those little things can be helpful to feed back to ad platforms as signals to help guide ad campaigns, but you’ll need to use them properly or you’ll drive yourself off the rails.

Value is only part of the equation, of course. Attribution modeling is a different topic, but applying values and mining the data is important without getting complicated with modeling, cross-channel attribution, and other tricky bits. Keep in mind that this might immediately ID sources of higher value “conversions”, but it also enables testing of value-oriented bid strategies in Google Ads. You’ll want at least a month of value tracking in your data before you test it, but Maximize Conversion Value could help you drive more of the conversions that you really want.

To put this another way, if you’re not paying attention to what value you attribute to each conversion event, you’re telling Google Ad that they’re all equal in value. Don’t feel compelled to assign values if you truly can’t ID them with some level of certainty, but at the very least you’ll want to make sure forms and purchases aren’t seen as equal to a phone call or click-based action.

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