Analytics Glossary

Conversion

The moment a visitor becomes a customer, subscriber, or lead.

A conversion is when a website visitor completes an action you care about — making a purchase, booking an appointment, signing up for a newsletter, downloading a resource, or filling out a contact form. Conversion rate is the percentage of visitors or sessions that result in that action.

Conversions are the metric that connects traffic to money. Two hundred visits mean little on their own; two hundred visits producing eleven booked consultations is a business result. Once you track conversions, every other number gains meaning — you can see which traffic sources, pages, and campaigns actually produce customers, not just visits, and spend your time and budget accordingly.

In Crafty Meerkat, conversion tracking is built around Goals: define what success means for your site, and the dashboard reports conversions and conversion rate for any date range — no spreadsheet math required.

How it works

A goal can be either a page visit — an exact path like /thank-you, or a whole section like /docs/* — or a custom event you send with one line of code, like window.craftymeerkat.event with a name such as “signup”. A session counts as converted the first time it hits the goal, so one enthusiastic visitor cannot inflate your rate. You can define up to 10 goals per site.

Goals also feed the AI Advisor: Stats Chat can answer questions about your conversion rates in plain English, and the weekly AI report compares each goal week-over-week and prioritizes its recommendations around improving conversion — so the advice you get is aimed at customers, not just clicks.

How to put it to work

1
Decide what a conversion means for you
Pick the one or two actions that most directly lead to revenue: a completed checkout, a booked call, a submitted quote form, a newsletter signup.
2
Create a goal
In your site’s dashboard, add a goal as a page visit (like /thank-you after a form) or a custom event. Page-visit goals need no code at all.
3
Send a custom event if needed
For actions without their own page — a button click, a form that stays on the page — fire an event when it happens.
```
window.craftymeerkat.event('signup', { plan: 'growth' })
```
4
Read conversion rate by source
Once data flows, compare conversion across referrers and campaigns. The channel with the best conversion rate — not the most visits — is where your next marketing dollar belongs.

Tips from the den

◆Track a small number of meaningful goals rather than everything clickable — 2 or 3 goals you act on beat 10 you ignore.
◆A “micro-conversion” like a newsletter signup is worth tracking alongside your main goal; it shows momentum from visitors who are not ready to buy yet.
◆When conversion rate drops, check your annotations and recent site changes first — the cause is usually something you shipped, not something the market did.

See it live — no signup

The demo dashboard runs on a real site with real traffic.

Open the live demo →

Common questions

What is a good conversion rate?

Typical e-commerce conversion rates fall in the 1–4% range; lead-generation sites often see 2–10% depending on how big the ask is. But the honest answer is: a good conversion rate is one that is improving. Compare your site against its own history month over month rather than against generic benchmarks.

Do I need to write code to track conversions?

Often not. If your conversion ends on its own page — like a /thank-you page after a form or checkout — a page-visit goal tracks it with zero code. You only need the one-line custom events call for actions that do not change the page.

What is the difference between a goal and a conversion?

A goal is the definition — “a session that reaches /thank-you” or “a session that fires the signup event”. A conversion is each time a real session meets that definition. You set goals once; conversions accumulate as visitors complete them.