# Conversion

> A desired action — a single event or a combination of events and attributes — that a business counts as a meaningful outcome and optimizes its marketing toward.

A **conversion** is a desired action — a single event or a combination of events and attributes — that a business counts as a meaningful outcome and optimizes its marketing toward. It can be a button click, an add-to-cart, a form submit, a booking, or a purchase; what makes it a conversion is that you have designated it as the result that matters. A conversion is always derived from one or more [events](/glossary/event).

## Per-persona meaning

- **Affiliate marketer:** a credited sale or lead the network reports via postback.
- **eCommerce marketer:** usually a Purchase (a store order), reconciled against the checkout backend.
- **Lead-gen marketer:** a Lead or CompleteRegistration, often closed offline.
- **Business owner:** a revenue or signup event for their own product.

## Do not confuse with

- [Event](/glossary/event) — any tracked action; a conversion is an event you single out as a desired outcome.
- [Standard Conversions](/glossary/standard-conversions) — the predefined platform-recognized names a conversion is normalized to.
- [Purchase](/glossary/purchase) — one *type* of conversion, not a synonym for the umbrella.
- [Attribution](/glossary/attribution) — the crediting *process*, not the outcome itself.

## In AnyTrack

AnyTrack normalizes each conversion into a [standard conversion](/glossary/standard-conversions) and forwards it to every connected ad platform in that platform's own format (track once, optimize everywhere). Conversions are captured client-side (the Tracking Tag) and server-side (webhook or API); server-side recovers the conversions lost to ad blockers and privacy restrictions. From an ad campaign's point of view, you choose a conversion objective and the matching conversions become the "results" the platform optimizes toward.