Micro Conversions: How to Track Them Effectively for Customer Retention and Increased Sales
Dec 8, 2021
Published by: Nahla Davies
Once upon a time, tracking conversions was black and white. But now conversions can represent an array of actions that customers can make to bring value to your brand.
Don’t be fooled by the name. “Micro” conversions can have a major impact on your brand when tracked and applied to your marketing strategies. Instead of focusing solely on conversion metrics like sales or sign-ups, marketing teams can direct their attention toward numerous metrics that provide even more context about customer needs.
With the right strategy for tracking micro conversions, marketers can increase campaign ROI, improve customer retention and increase sales. Marketers must discover the right combination of actions and web design that bring the best growth, and micro conversions hold the key to understanding key insights about your target audiences.
What are micro conversions?
If macro conversions are the main goals of your marketing campaigns, then micro conversions are the smaller actions that your visitors make along the way to becoming customers.
Some examples of macro conversions include making a purchase, requesting a quote or filling out a form. But what smaller actions did these consumers take leading up to their macro conversion?
What drew their attention to your brand? How did their journey begin? That is what marketing teams need to find out to maximize their sales potential and optimize the steps along the customer journey.
Micro conversions can be any measurable action that visitors make while visiting your website such as viewing a product page, adding an item to their wish list, or otherwise engaging with your website content. Let’s take a look at some examples of micro-conversions:
Viewing a certain number of pages or visiting landing pages
Signing up for email newsletters
Sharing, commenting and liking social media posts
Steps leading up to checkout like adding to cart, saving for later or adding to wish list
Viewing blogs or videos
Downloading content
Creating an account
By measuring micro-conversions like these, marketers can build a more holistic understanding of their audience’s preferences and behaviors.
The importance of micro conversions
Why should you care about micro conversions? Because these seemingly insignificant interactions can have an impressive impact on your brand strategy. Tracking and analyzing information from visitors that didn’t make a purchase provides you with valuable insight into how their experience with your brand evolved, what turned them off and what drew them in.
Micro conversions tell a story about how consumers become customers. Where are people sharing your content? Which channels lead to micro conversions and macro conversions? How do people use your website?
Businesses can also gain a better perspective of their own websites.
How visitors engage and interact on your website can tell you a lot about how your user experience affects conversions. Then you can share these insights with your web developers and designers to make your pages more appealing to visitors.
If you don’t have an in-house developer, you can expect to pay around $60 to $100 per hour for a professional freelancer. You should work closely with them to ensure they create a user experience that communicates your brand identity.
All of the above can assist you in learning ways to build confidence in your business over time. As customers get to know your brand, they may interact with some of your posts, share an article, join your email list, or look at a few product pages. Eventually, that visitor will begin to trust your brand and make a purchase (or multiple).
When consumers are confident in your brand, they’re more likely to:
Share your posts and ads
Post reviews of your products
Become long term customers
This means:
Your online presence increases
Your number of referrals increases
You discover valuable customer insights
Even some supposedly “less significant” interactions are a goldmine when it comes to measuring engagement and discovering what converts your target audiences into long-term customers.
Defining micro conversions
On average, conversion rates reach about 2% on the high end. But what about the other 98% that didn’t convert? What can we learn from them? In order to glean powerful insights, defining, tracking, and measuring micro conversions is the way to go.
Whereas macro conversions are fairly obvious to identify, micro conversions are a little less conspicuous. Each brand will define their micro conversions differently according to what their business does, what industry they fall under, and how revenue is generated.
For example, if the goal of your website is purely to make sales, your micro conversions will look different than a site that’s goal is to build brand authority. Marketing teams will need to collaborate with other department heads so that the right micro conversions are being tracked per company needs.
Once you have a clear understanding of your goals, consider what actions indicate that a customer is headed toward a conversion. What actions on your website create value for your business? Keep track of your answers since they will help shape your micro conversion definitions.
Ultimately, defining your brand’s micro conversions will come down to any actions that show a customer’s intent to buy or at least show serious interest in your products.
Most e-commerce sites should track actions that show interest in products like watching videos, browsing product images, using the site search toolbar, reading product reviews or using product comparison tools. For lead generation sites, micro conversions might look like downloading ebooks and other resources, clicking on certain links or filling out contact forms.
Tracking micro conversions
There are several ways to track conversions throughout the sales funnel, including free online tools and paid services. Google Analytics is one of the most popular ways to track conversions as events, especially if the concept is new to you.
Want to start tracking micro conversions with Google Analytics? Here’s how:
After signing into your Google Analytics account, click Admin.
Find the View column and select Goals.
Click + NEW GOAL, then choose a goal from templates (or create your own under Custom).
Set a name and select the goal (micro conversion), and then click Continue.
Track your progress by clicking Conversions and selecting Goals.
These are instructions for tracking micro conversions with Google Analytics as Goals, but you can also track them as Events if you prefer. However, a developer will need to set up custom tracking code for Events. The average developer possesses less than five years of experience, but Google Analytics makes most functions fairly straightforward.
You can also use behavior analytics tools which show what your visitors are paying attention to on your site, why they visit your page, and how they use it. No matter what software you use, it’s important to optimize your funnel and make adjustments according to the direction of your insights. Over time, aspects of your business, audience and marketing tools will change and so should your approach to tracking and measuring conversions.
Conclusion
Rarely does someone go directly to a website and make a purchase right away.
Visitors need time to get to know your company and decide if what you have to offer suits their needs. This means they will be browsing your website and clicking through your products to learn more.
Macro conversions like purchases are still important metrics to keep an eye on, but micro conversions have a lot to offer as well. An approach that measures both types of conversion metrics allows companies to gain a much better view of how visitors are using your web site and interacting with your brand.
