the.com/conversion
The moment a stranger decides your thing is worth money, love, or belief.
means The act of changing something — or someone — from one state, form, or purpose into another, whether that's a currency, a room, a heathen, or a hopeful website visitor.
from From Latin convertere — 'to turn around completely,' built from com- (thoroughly) plus vertere (to turn). The 'turn' is literal: Roman writers used vertere for spinning a plow around at the end of a furrow. Over centuries that same turning got borrowed for religious transformation (turning toward a faith), for changing one unit into another, and eventually for marketers watching a browsing stranger turn into a buyer — the plow still turning the same furrow, just dressed up in a sales dashboard.
- marketing math
- average ecommerce conversion rate hovers near 2 percent
- religious roots
- oldest recorded usage meant changing one's faith
- unit trap
- mars climate orbiter crashed over a conversion error
- funnel logic
- every conversion implies hundreds of silent nos