Search engines are most commonly used on mobile devices—but that doesn’t mean that’s where conversions are happening. Most search ad impressions come from mobile devices, but ad prices and revenues per click are still higher on desktop PCs. Voice shopping remains a nascent consumer behavior; more internet users see the value in visual search.

According to Jasper Radeke, senior director of marketing at AppsFlyer, conversions in retailer apps that had retargeted their users grew 154% between 2017 and 2018. And an AppsFlyer study published in June 2019 found that one in four in-app conversions across all apps this year could be traced to retargeting efforts. This represented a roughly 350% growth in share of conversions since 2017.

Despite that fact, Adobe data points to smartphone conversion rates improving from 2.1% during the 2017 holiday season to 2.3% during the 2018 holiday season—a 9% gain that outpaced the roughly 5% conversion gains in desktop and tablet.

But the customer experience doesn’t stop when someone makes a purchase—the post-conversion experience is critical for driving brand advocacy as well as multiple purchases. Keeping customers coming back is key to any brand’s success. And loyalty marketing can encompass just about any touchpoint, since the purchase journey is cyclical.

There’s a flood of extra traffic, clicks and conversions out there for the taking. According to a study from CJ Affiliate by Conversant, US industrywide ecommerce performance metrics saw almost universal increases across several product categories. Seven of the nine categories analyzed achieved gains in clicks, orders, revenues and conversion rates.

Unlike paid promotion in social channels, where direct payback and conversion triggers are often built in, earned media strategies have softer aims.

Advertisers who use conversion objectives must use the pixel with their ads. The app has eight third-party conversion tracking partners: AppsFlyer, Adjust, Tune, Kochava, FOX, Singular, Party and Tenjin. These partners help track conversion, in-app actions, impressions and click attribution. TikTok also has measurement partnerships with Moat and IAS, Chandlee said at Advertising Week.

The most important metric by far is the conversion rate. Marketers will often choose a conversion event that is too generic and isn't a good indicator of the performance of the actual message. For example, if a travel app wants to drive purchases of tickets to New York, setting the conversion event as "purchase ticket" doesn't show how effective the notification was.