How to interpret conversions

Now that you’ve integrated Parse.ly Conversions Tracking, you may wonder: “how do I interpret conversions?”

Conversions Interpretation via Example Visitor Journey Map

Visitor Journey 1

This visitor arrives at your site. The first thing they see is this non-post page (A), e.g., your home page. Next, they visit a post page(B), a piece of content. Lastly, they navigate to another non-post page(C), where they convert.

Once the conversion takes place, Parse.ly retroactively attributes each page of the visitor journey with the appropriate credit. We have four attribution models: First Touch, Linear, Last Post Touched, and Last Touch.

URL A

URL A is where your visitor arrived so it receives one first-touch conversion. Visitor 1 visited three pages in order to convert. So each of those three pages receives an equal portion of the linear conversion. URL A receives 1/3 linear conversions.

URL B

This also receives 1/3 linear conversions. Since this is the last piece of content consumed prior to conversion, it will receive 1 Last Post Touched conversion as well. This is an important feature of conversion attributions since it gives credit to the content where credit is due. The content is driving decisions here, not the transactional page that contains a form.

URL C

This URL could be nothing more than a page with a form. Nevertheless, it will receive 1/3 linear conversions and finally 1 Last Touch conversion.

Visitor Journey 2

This visitor journey is similar to Visitor 1 except that they only visited 2 pages. The main difference this creates is the amount of credit each page receives with respect to linear conversions. Each page will receive 1/2 credit.

Visitor Journey 3

This visitor journey is similar to the other two but contains even more pages until conversion. This lessens the credit of each linear conversion to 1/4 each. Also notice that there this visitor viewed two post pages. Only one post page will receive credit as Last Post Touched.

How to Interpret Conversions in the Aggregate Data

Now that we’ve looked at individual examples, we must aggregate the data for easier analysis. See the last row of the Visitor Journey Map, above. One of the most common conversion questions that we receive is “how to interpret linear conversions?” From the Visitor Journey Map, let’s examine URL B. All three visitors visited this Post page but the number of linear conversions they generated isn’t easily guessed without some math. However, we can add up the credit from each journey, 1/3 + 1/2 + 1/4 to arrive at 1.083 linear conversions.

What Do These Conversions Mean to Me?

We recommend looking at each attribution model in the default descending order sort. Each model reveals a unique insight. Imagine the top results for the following models:

• First Touch – This is the place where the journey to conversion begins. This could be your homepage, a landing page where your latest campaign directed your readers, viral, or evergreen content.
• Linear – This shows you all of the pages within the conversion journey, including pages captured by all the other attribution methods. You may see overlap with the other attribution models, but you will also be able to identify influential content in the middle of many conversion journeys.
• Last Post Touched – Depending on your site setup, this will show you the posts read before the conversion (the transaction) takes place on a non-post page, like a landing page or a form fill.
• Last Touch – This is the place where the conversion actually happened. In many cases, it could be a purely transactional page, like a landing page listing newsletters to check off. In others, it’s a post page that has a newsletter popup.