Conversion is the reason your digital marketing exists. Most people think of that moment when a website visitor becomes a paying customer when the topic of conversions comes up. While that is the ultimate conversion, there are a number of other measures of success that can be tracked along a visitor’s journey to becoming a customer. Thus, digital analysts divide conversions into two categories – macro conversions (the ultimate goal of your website) and micro conversions.
What are Micro Conversions?
A micro conversion is a single action taken by a website visitor that brings them closer to the completion of a primary conversion goal, or macro conversion. Micro conversions are indicators of interest. Tracking micro conversion points along the way can help you understand where users may drop off or get fast-tracked to the ultimate goal.
Examples of micro conversions include:
Signing up for an email newsletter
Browsing the site – pages viewed, time spent on a lead page, etc.
Comments left on articles or posts
Taking steps towards checkout – adding items to a cart, viewing product pages, etc.
Viewing video
Sharing content on social media
Downloading resources like ebooks or checklists
How to Choose the Right Micro Conversions for your Brand
For most businesses, the main micro conversion is product purchase completion. That being said, buying might not be the only reason consumers visit your website. They may be interested in reading or watching your content, signing up for a newsletter or job list, researching information on your products or services, or accessing your technical or customer support.
While these user activities do not immediately meet your ultimate objective of a macro conversion, they are still value added both for your customers and your brand. These micro conversions help build trust and credibility with prospective customers and strengthen your relationship with existing customers.
The main principle behind selecting the right micro conversions for your brand is straightforward. Identify the user actions that bring prospects closer to the ultimate conversion and establish each step in the series of actions as a micro conversion. These micro conversions measure the early engagement actions of a customer’s digital journey that are not captured by macro conversions focused only on purchasing. By tracking how users are converting on engagement actions, you can find and fix friction points that will, ultimately, improve your bottom line.
Why You Should Track Micro Conversions
Visitors rarely make a purchase on their first visit to your site. A conversion is built through a number of preceding, smaller activities. It is the summation of these micro conversions that eventually leads to a sale. The micro conversions help your brand understand visitor behavior, analyze key areas to focus on conversion optimization, and allow you to nurture leads. Micro conversions also help you measure the effectiveness of different communication channels, and build effective conversion funnels.
It is important to understand visitors’ actions on your site, even if they are not buying something. The more information you can gather and analyze about the visitors to your site, the more efficiently you can segment your audience. This approach allows you to create specifically targeted campaigns for each subgroup. Understanding your micro conversions also helps your brand focus in on areas of your website that can be optimized distinctly from other areas of the website.
Segmenting and then targeting your audience will increase the quality of the leads you gain from your site. The more information you have to nurture those leads, the more you will see macro conversions. One of the easiest ways to nurture your leads is to create content that directly addresses the pain points your existing and potential customers face. And, most importantly, how your products or services will help overcome those pain points. Customized communications to personalize your approach to prospective customers is another strategy that will help nurture site visitors to become paying customers.
Micro Conversion Analytics
Micro conversion analytics can be tracked in the same way you perform standard eCommerce conversion tracking. A resource such as Google Analytics can make the task go more smoothly and quickly. Most website hosting platforms either work directly through Google Analytics or have a readily accessible plugin for the software.
You can analyze visitor performance for each of those smaller steps once you’ve identified your macro conversions and the particular micro conversions that lead up to each of those larger conversions. By understanding where potential customers are getting hung up or leaving the site entirely, you can better focus your optimization efforts on presenting those micro conversions. This will help to ensure that all obstacles and objections are removed so visitors move smoothly through the purchasing funnel.
Micro conversions can provide invaluable insight into how visitors are engaging with your website. These secondary actions might not lead directly to a purchasing conversion but they certainly indicate a certain level of interest and information you can use to best lead site visitors to an eventual macro conversion.
The experts at Strategy Driven Marketing understand the importance of analytics as a means to inform marketing strategy and execution of that strategy. We would love to learn more about your brand and business goals in order to help you take a broader look at how consumers are using your site and where micro conversions fit best within the purchasing journey. Contact us today to start a conversation about analytics, ecommerce, website design, social media, or whatever your marketing needs are. Let’s get started!
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