Digital Advertising Conversions

To get the most out of Google Ads, Facebook Ads, Twitter Ads, or any other digital advertising platform, advertising specialists require an "event" to optimize around.

Colloquially, advertising managers call these events "conversions."

These events enable automated advertising systems to target ads based on performance and help calibrate marketing's approach in acquiring potential customers.

In today's modern marketing ecosystem, Google and others have access to millions of consumer data points. Armed with these events, their systems can leverage machine learning algorithms to target potential customers during precise buying moments. The technology affords much better efficiency than marketing executives could ever get on their own using their own beliefs about what creative and target audiences should perform best.

Examples of "events" advertisers target include:

• E-Commerce Sales

• Lead Generated

• Whitepapers Downloaded

• Webinar Signups

• Email Captures

• Engagement with a page

Selecting a digital conversion event is challenging for some businesses

Some advertisers don't have a digital purchase and instead need to rely on a proxy metric to attribute value.

For example, consumers typically don't purchase a Mercedes-Benz online. As a result, Mercedes may instead optimize for online engagement like clicks to on a "Store Locator" button or engagement with a feature such as "Build Your Perfect Mercedes."

Both of those events help approximate an offline sale and nudge the potential customer along the journey to visiting a dealership and purchasing a car.

HiPPO approach to digital advertising

Some businesses are less interested in a data-based approach to optimizing ads and improving performance.

These businesses implicitly choose to optimize using the HiPPO Method. This type of decision making tends to be more prevalent in:

• Offline businesses

• Hierarchal organizations

• Countries that lack "Individualistic" tendencies