First, a Conversion is to be defined as:

the action you wish for someone to take.

A conversion can be a sale, an opt-in, or simply landing on a specific page of the website. This definition is important.

Conversion campaigns are designed to track specific actions that are being taken on your website as a result of social ad campaigns. These actions include page views, registrations, leads, and purchases. To track these actions, a snippet of code, commonly referred to as a pixel, from all relevant social channels needs to be added to the code of your website (or added to Google Tag Manager). Common ecommerce platforms, like Shopify and WooCommerce, integrate nicely with most social channels to help make the setup and tracking faster and more efficient. Using event specific codes such as “Add to Cart” or “Complete Registration” can be added on specific pages for more accurate tracking.

You can assign a value to a conversion or integrate it with your website to track conversion amounts.

When someone takes the action that you want, the social site will capture that action and optimize the campaign around the information captured on that conversion. For instance, for every person who buys something from your website via a Facebook ads, Facebook will then adjust the ad campaign to be seen by more people who share interests and demographics with the people who have converted.

Conversion campaigns exist on most social ad platforms and can, generally, include various media types including: text-only posts, videos, graphics and photos.

If you are trying to generate ROI from your social media activities, then conversion ads should be strongly considered for your social media strategy.