One of the newest ways that marketers are getting an edge over the competition is by measuring micro conversions on a massive scale. For a long time, marketers were only concerned with the macro conversion, and analytics tools only provided data on those conversions. But today, there are a lot more options for measuring your marketing efforts. We will be looking at the micro conversion and why it is important to marketing in this article.
What is a Micro Conversion?
A micro conversion is any action taken by a visitor to your site that leads up to your main conversion goal. Depending upon the product or service and your specific marketing plan, you may have an end goal of the person buying the actual product or even just getting more information about it. If you operate a squeeze page that is intended to collect email addresses for later marketing, then getting them to sign up with their email is your end goal. However, there going to be a number of steps that must be taken leading up to that end goal, some of them extremely minor. These are micro conversions, and they can tell you a lot more about your website or advertising message than you realize.
Examples of Micro Conversions
There are a lot of micro conversions that could be measured from any website. However, there are some that are more commonly measured than others and there are some pretty specific reasons why. One example of a micro conversion on a website where a purchase is the end goal is to get the visitor to give you their email address. The reason that this micro conversion is used as a barometer is due to the trust that is required to give someone your email address.
Most people protect their email address very carefully, and they are more discerning about who they give it to them the people they follow on social media. Another example of a micro conversion that can tell you a great deal about how interested someone is in your brand is whether or not they will take the time to sign up for an account, something that not only gives you their email address but usually requires that they actually take action and click on a verification link within their email.
Why Micro Conversions are Important
Micro conversions are important for several reasons. Generally, only 1% to 2% of visitors to your site will convert to buyers. That means that unless you are measuring micro conversions, the remaining 98% are giving you no useful information whatsoever. If you have a 1% conversion rate, then out of a thousand visitors that come to your site you only get usable data out of 10 of them unless you are measuring micro conversions. You want the information that the other 990 people can give you – namely, the reason that they didn’t complete the sales funnel and convert to a customer.
Tracking Micro Conversions with Analytics
Your analytics program is one of the best ways that you can track micro conversions. From the minute that someone lands on your page, you can start tracking actions that will lead to your goal result. In fact, the first metric that your analytics program will tell you is how quickly people bounce. If you have an almost instantaneous bounce rate, then you need to improve the content above the fold to grab their attention because it obviously is lacking something.
There are all kinds of things that you can track using Google analytics or whatever program you prefer. The Google analytics program allows you to add micro conversions as events and then compare them alongside regular metrics like the keyword that they used to get to your site and the referring source.
Micro Conversions vs. Macro Conversions
In addition to the micro conversions that you can measure to get data on your visitors, there are number of macro conversions that you could be looking at as well. Generally, anyone that tracks analytics for their website will be paying attention to the macro conversions anyway. Macro conversions usually include your end goal, but that may not be the only type of macro conversion that you can measure. For example, depending upon the type of website you have in your product, macro conversions could include filling out the contact form for more information, requesting a quote, signing up for a free trial or downloading the free version of an app.
Conclusion
No matter what kind of business you are in, you should take a serious look at tracking your micro conversions. You can learn a great deal about the visitors to your site and be able to make improvements that you wouldn’t normally have thought of.
