Micro Conversions are small yet significant actions that customers take on your website that have the potential to convert into sales.
The internet is impregnated with information about this subject. There are articles that speak about how to track these conversions, others on how to identify the right Micro Conversion goals and there are some which also tell you about conversion goal optimization. So, you can either read all those articles and get your answers in bits and pieces or read our article where we have coagulated everything you need to know about Micro Conversions from A to Z.
LET US TAKE IT FROM THE START.
Do you know that the customers that visit your site, speak to you without any direct communication? They take those little steps and drop hints, expressing interest in your products and services before actually purchasing them. These initial steps are Micro Conversions.
So, what are those little steps that can be considered as types of Micro Conversions?
Let us give you a few examples. A visitor clicking on ‘Add to cart’, ‘Buy Now’ or ‘Check Out’ is a Micro Conversion. Similarly, engaging on your posts/ videos on social media, sharing them, commenting on your articles, downloading newsletters, eBooks and files, filling out forms, and spending time navigating the pages on your website are all types of Micro Conversions
WHY SHOULD YOU BE TRACKING AND OPTIMIZING MICRO CONVERSIONS?
They give you a glimpse of how effectively you have captured the visitor’s attention through the content and layout of your site. But all these visitors may not necessarily proceed to make a purchase and fulfill your Conversion goals.. For conversion goal optimization, you need to convert the Micro Conversions into Macro Conversions by greasing the skids during the visitor journey. A Macro Conversion is the actual sale and that is what you are really interested in for generating more revenue.
They give you a better insight into the customer’s early actions during their digital journey on your website. This is achieved by discovering opportunities for conversion goal optimization and spot problems that prevented customers from converting.
They help you to zero in on the key areas to optimize conversion rate.
They enable you to identify cross channel tracking so that you know which channels your customers are using to share the content.
They accelerate your experiment results. The amount of time required to run your ab or Multivariate tests is dependent on the traffic and conversions achieved. Your site may record more Micro-Conversions than sales, so your experiments go faster using them as test goals.
Hence the bottom line is that if you fail to track how your users are ‘micro converting’ to crucial engagement actions on your website, you are unable to fix the above friction points.
WHICH MICRO CONVERSIONS SHOULD YOU BE TRACKING.
Now that you know what Micro conversions are and how you should be tracking them, we bet your question is which ones should you be tracking to optimize conversion rate? The answer is simple. Track the ones that are important for your business.
If you are a software company, then the Micro Conversions to be tracked would be the sign ups, email captures, and the account creations. For an e-commerce business it would be the initial actions like ‘Add to Wishlist’, ‘Add to Cart’, ‘Proceed to Checkout’ etc. If you are running a news site then you have to track the metrics like engagement on blogs and articles, shares on social media, email captures, the time spent on the site and video plays. If what you own is a local business then, clicks for directions, calls and location landing pages is what you must track. For your consultancy services, we suggest you track email captures, video plays, the number of visitors returning and pages per visit.
HOW TO TRACK MICRO CONVERSIONS.
You can track it many ways. The most common way is by logging the Micro Conversions into web analytics platforms such as Google Analytics.
This tool enables you to log Micro conversions:
As events by adding them to the web analytics data and comparing them to other metrics and
As conversion goals, where you add individual steps as goals and set up a conversion funnel.
They can also be logged in testing tools such as Optimizely, SiteSpect or VWO while running tests or experiments to optimize conversion rate. Having data on the Micro Conversions that users are taking in the different variations can be extremely valuable to significantly influence the conversion goals and rate.
That covers everything for now to set the ball for your conversion goals rolling. But we don’t plan to stop here. Watch this space out for our article on How to Track Micro Conversions, that is coming soon where we flesh out the process of tracking in detail to give you an in depth understanding of how to use Micro Conversions for conversion goal optimization.