A website has become inevitable for a brand as it’s the primary asset to optimize the sales funnel and allow entrepreneurs to maximize conversions. But when thinking of conversions, do you envision a customer in the final stage of making payment to purchase your products or services? It’s not entirely wrong but you can’t label it as the single measure of your success.
Then what’s the real measure of success? To understand this, let’s look at conversions as a comprehensive phenomenon that can be divided into two categories. Confused, don’t worry just read the article you will get a clearer picture of what’s been discussed.
Macro & Micro Conversions: Two Sides Of The Same Coin
According to Statista, 68% of B2B marketers named improving conversion rates/campaign results as the foremost demand generation priority in 2019.
Earlier, marketers were experiencing challenges in measuring the impact of their marketing efforts and tracking activities in specific buyer and product stages (at prototyping stage, pre-launch stage or post-launch stage). But with just a little bit of caution analyzing the data will become an absolute breeze and marketers and sales managers can easily measure the conversions which are the key metric to show the true success of their campaigns and analyzing the customer journey easily with help of tracking their actions.
Let’s dive deep into conversions. Yes, it’s a known fact that macro conversions are the primary goal of any website. But have you ever thought of every small action that leads up to this larger goal? This is where micro conversions come into the picture. Let’s look into details.
Macro Conversions
A macro conversion is associated with one of the main goals of your website. It’s when a user a primary call to action on your site, say a lead pushed to a pipeline management software. The primary goal of websites varies from one to another. For example, an e-commerce site would always be a purchase. Also, providing a lead or giving a donation comes under the umbrella of macro conversions.
Micro Conversions
Micro conversions are the baby steps a user can take on his journey of showing initial interest in your product. These are visitor actions taken towards completing a primary conversion goal or macro conversion. For example, micro conversions can be actions such as downloading e-books, viewing videos, adding items to the cart, reviewing product pages, email newsletter signups, etc.
These conversions do not take place necessarily during the sales cycle. Visitors can take several steps which aren’t directly related to the sales cycle but can be included in this category such as a user starts following your brand on social media platforms or shares one of your posts. All such actions are also micro conversions.
Categories Of Micro Conversions
According to Jen Cardello who is the VP (User Experience Research & Insights) at Fidelity Investments, categorize micro conversions into two types:
1. Process Milestones
These are actions taken towards completion of a macro conversion such as users viewing your product page or adding an item to their shopping cart. By tracking these activities you can identify the areas where your web development company needs to work on the UX design of your digital store.
2. Secondary Actions
These are desirable actions that indicate that a visitor is interested in your brand. For instance, secondary actions may include activities such as a user tweeting about your company, commenting on one of your blogs, creating an account, etc. These actions hint towards potential macro conversions that can occur in the future.
What Is The Importance Of Tracking Micro Conversions?
It rarely happens that a user purchases your product only by paying a single visit to your web store. They gradually get familiar with your brand and for getting familiar they take several incremental steps which are known as micro conversions. Now, what’s their need?
Imagine a situation when a user randomly lands on your blog and liked it to such an extent that he shared it on his social media profile. Also, he signed up for receiving your monthly newsletter so that to keep getting such posts in the future.
He didn’t purchase your product but this does not mean that he is less important to your brand. But by taking these small steps such users learn to trust your brand in the long run and ultimately take the leap into fully converting.
Tracking micro conversions is significant as it gives you a clear picture about users’ behaviour on your website and ways to optimize it for higher conversion rates. You can track the details and analyze how effective your brand is at engaging visitors. Also, marketers can use this data to build more targeted and efficient campaigns.
Micro conversions can be tracked to get an idea of different social channels that visitors are using to share your content. In addition, you can also discover that which traffic sources are leading to micro-conversions? Monitoring these actions can be useful in evaluating the overall performance of your website.
How To Track Micro Conversions?
There are two major ways to track micro conversions and both of these involve Google Analytics. Let’s look at these two integral ways in detail:
I. This method requires you to have Google Tag Manager as you will measure micro conversions as events here. Events can be any type of interactions a user has with your website such as document download, video play, page view, etc.
For this method, you need to set up a GTM account first and get your website placed on the Google Analytics platform. After setting up the basic framework you need to create different events to track micro conversions.
Imagine you have an e-commerce website and want to track all the clicks to the “Checkout” link. In order to perform this action follow the steps mentioned below:
a. Go to the GTM and click on “Variables” option provided on the left-hand menu. Also, check the box next to “Click URL.”
b. Create a new trigger by clicking on “Triggers”. Get done with the settings and give the trigger a name.
d. Click on “Tags” and choose the option “Universal Analytics”. Save it by giving a descriptive name.
e. Finally, you will be able to track the event on Google Analytics which will give you an idea of the number of visitors who have clicked on the “Checkout” link.
II. The second method with which you can track micro conversions in Google Analytics is through goals. It’s a practice that setting up goals can help in monitoring macro conversions. But it also can be used to track micro ones.
You can either set up different goals in Google Analytics such as pages per session, duration, destination, etc. Or, you can also use goals to create funnels which will be especially beneficial for you when tracking micro conversions. In addition, Google Analytics also provides you with readymade goal templates so that there is no need for you to set up a goal from scratch.
Let’s understand it with the help of the example where you want to craft a goal to track visitors who stopover the checkout page on your e-commerce portal. You need to follow the steps mentioned below in order to do the same:
a. Go to Google Analytics and pick your web property. Start by clicking ADMIN on the left- hand menu.
b. Click “Goals” in the View column. You will get a new page with a table in the centre.
c. Go to the top of the table and click +NEW GOAL. Choose Custom at the bottom and click Continue.
d. Add a descriptive name to your goal and click on the radio button located next to Destination. Click on the Continue button.
e. Enter the URL of the checkout page to fill your goal details. Also, keep Value and Funnel off at this point in time.
f. Click Save and track the micro conversions.
Now you are aware of the basics of micro conversions and how to track them in order to optimize your e-commerce website. If you are one of those who hasn’t started yet, then break the ice and enjoy higher conversion rates.
Anubhuti Shrivastava is a content crafter at Studyclerk and Benchpoint. She is passionate about writing articles on topics related to design and the software development industry.
