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.

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. In that scale, with your most valuable conversion being worth “100”, and the other conversions falling somewhere in 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 exactly what you’re attributing is just as important.