What is a conversion goal?

Who decides what counts as a conversion?

The site's owner, always. A newsletter unsubscribe form, a search box and a checkout are all form submissions; only one of them is a success, and no amount of behavioural signal reveals which.

Automated goal detection is genuinely useful — crawling a site to find the forms and flows that look like conversions saves real work. What it produces is a proposal. A system that promotes its own proposals to facts will eventually count a cancellation flow as a win and report the resulting 'lift' with complete confidence.

The rule worth applying to any tool: it may suggest goals, and a person must confirm them. Anything unconfirmed is a candidate, not a number.

What is the difference between macro and micro conversions?

A macro conversion is the outcome the business actually wants — a purchase, a signed contract. A micro conversion is a step towards it: an email captured, a demo watched, an item added to a cart.

Micro conversions are useful because they are frequent enough to measure quickly, and dangerous for the same reason. Optimizing hard for a micro conversion can move it a long way while leaving revenue flat, or reducing it — capturing more emails from people who were about to buy is not progress.

The safe use is diagnostic: watch micro conversions to understand where a funnel leaks, and judge success on the macro one.

What happens when the goal is wrong?

Everything downstream is confidently wrong. The optimization steers towards the wrong outcome, the lift measurement certifies that it succeeded, and nothing in the system reports a problem — because by its own definition there is none.

This is why a conversion goal deserves more scrutiny than the tooling around it. A mediocre optimization pointed at the right goal is worth more than an excellent one pointed at the wrong one, and only the second failure is invisible.