Conversions and activation

Every other number in LaunchPulse hangs off two definitions you write yourself: what counts as a conversion, and what counts as first value. Set them in Settings → Tracking.

Nobody can pick these for you. A conversion for a newsletter is an email address; for a SaaS it’s an account; for a store it’s a paid order. LaunchPulse asks you once and then measures against it everywhere.

The most important thing to understand

Your conversion, first value, tracked events and aliases are read-time configuration. They live in your project settings, and they get applied when a query runs. They are never written into the event store.

That has three consequences worth internalizing:

• Changing your conversion event retroactively reinterprets your entire history. Every past event is re-read with the new definition. Instantly. There’s no backfill job and no waiting.
• You never need to re-install the tracker or re-send events after a config change. The events you already collected are enough.
• Getting it wrong is cheap. Try a definition, look at the numbers, change your mind. Nothing is destroyed.

The settings page says it plainly: Changes apply to all past and future events — no re-install needed.

Stage 1 — the conversion

The conversion is the moment a visitor stops being a stranger. It’s the top-level number on your Pulse dashboard and the denominator for everything downstream.

You can define it two ways.

Event conversion

An event name your app sends, like account_created. Your code fires it, LaunchPulse counts it.

lp.track('account_created');

Name rules:

If you break one of these, the form tells you: Event names use letters, numbers, . _ - (max 64 chars).

Page conversion

A page path visitors reach, like /thank-you. No code required — LaunchPulse matches it against $pageview events you’re already collecting.

A page conversion is a prefix match, not an exact match. The path you configure matches any $pageview whose path starts with it. So /thank-you also matches /thank-you/premium and /thank-you?ref=x.

That’s usually what you want — one rule covers a family of confirmation pages. But it cuts both ways. If you set /app as your conversion, every page inside your product counts, and your conversion rate becomes meaningless. Pick the narrowest path that still catches every success case.

Which kind should you use?

Use a page conversion when there’s a dedicated confirmation URL and you don’t want to touch code. It’s the fastest way to get a working funnel on day one.

Use an event conversion when success doesn’t have its own URL — a modal, an in-place state change, a purchase confirmed by your backend. It’s also more truthful, because you control exactly when it fires.

Stage 2 — first value

The conversion tells you someone signed up. It doesn’t tell you whether they got anything out of it. That’s what first value is for: the “aha moment” where your product actually delivers.

It’s a single event name. Leave it empty to clear it. It requires a conversion to be configured first — activation is measured relative to conversion, so there’s nothing to measure against without one.

How activation is calculated

Be precise about this, because it’s easy to assume the wrong thing:

• An actor is activated when they hit the first-value event at or after their conversion time. A first-value event that fired before they converted doesn’t count.
• Activation rate is a share of converters, not of visitors. If 1,000 people visit, 100 sign up and 40 create a project, your activation rate is 40% — not 4%.
• Time to value is the median of (first value time − conversion time) across activated actors.

Measuring activation against converters is the point. It isolates one question: of the people who said yes, how many actually got somewhere? A dip there is a product problem, not a marketing problem — and no amount of extra traffic will fix it.

Choosing a good pair

The conversion is the promise. First value is the payoff. They should be different moments.

A good first-value event is something the user does themselves, that they’d notice if it were missing, and that reliably predicts they’ll stick around. If everyone who signs up hits it within seconds, it’s too easy to be interesting. If almost nobody hits it, it’s too far down the funnel to steer by.

Call identify(), or activation stays empty

This is the single most common reason a dashboard shows conversions but 0 reached first value.

LaunchPulse groups events by actor: your user_id when it knows one, otherwise an anonymous per-browser visitor_id. If you never call identify(), someone who signs up on their laptop and reaches first value a week later — or on their phone, or via an event your backend sends — looks like two unrelated visitors. Activation can’t be computed, and time to value stays blank.

// as soon as a session exists, on every page load — not only at signup
lp.identify(user.id); // your internal id, never an email

Call it on every page load where a user is signed in, not just once at signup. See identifying users for the full details.

Stage + — extra tracked events

Below the two stages there’s a textarea for additional events you want counted. Comma- or newline-separated. It replaces the whole list each time you save — it isn’t a merge.

Entries are deduplicated and validated with the same name rules as above. The list is capped at 12 tracked events; extras beyond that are silently dropped rather than raising an error, so if you paste 20 names, check the chips afterwards to see which 12 survived. Your current entries show as chips under the field.

These feed the events log, insights and alerts. They aren’t part of the funnel — the funnel is conversion and first value only.

The dropdowns are populated from real data

Every event input is backed by a dropdown of event names your site has actually sent in the last 30 days, with counts next to each. You don’t have to remember what you named things, and you can’t typo your way into a definition that matches nothing.

If a name you expect isn’t in the list, your site isn’t sending it. Check tracking events and troubleshooting.

The settings UI shows your current value or Not set for each field.

Where to go next

• Tracking events — sending custom events from your app
• Event aliases — when your code and your config disagree on names
• The Pulse dashboard — where these definitions show up
• Project settings — a tour of all four tabs