Introducing Micro Conversions

Introducing Micro Conversions

Recently I had a conversation with a prospect who was conducting a lot of different marketing campaigns to their site. The client went to a great deal of effort creating a dashboard of KPIs (key performance indicators), consisting of conversion rates for each of their campaigns. For each type of program (E-mails, newsletters, search marketing), they were able to get the dollars spent and resulting sales, as well as overall conversion rates. While I applauded their effort in measuring their success, my immediate question was “how actionable is this data”?

Consider this – what if the report told them that one of their campaign’s conversion rate dropped from 5% to 2%? What actions can they take based on the report?

This is where “micro conversions” come in. While macro conversions are often used by managers and executives to better understand their overall business, they don’t provide the level of granularity that the rest of us need to take actions upon the data.

As an example, consider an e-commerce site. The conversion rate is calculated as the ratio of transactions (conversions) divided by visits to the site. Now let’s look at the micro conversions – the steps necessary by the visitors in order to complete the transaction. Upon their entry, visitors should click on a link and go to the next step. They then have to find the product of interest, add the product to cart, proceed to checkout and complete the transaction. These steps constitute a series of smaller steps – micro conversions – that can be measured. So when the site conversion rate drops, you can refer to your micro conversions to see exactly where you’re experiencing the drop-offs. Again, the micro conversions for the example illustrated above are:

• Beyond Landing Page: percentage of visitors that made it past the landing page


• Landing to Products: percentage of visitors making it to the product page


• Product to Cart: percentage of visitors going from product pages to cart


• Cart to Checkout: percentage of carted visitors making it to checkout


• Checkout Conversion: percentage of visitors who checked out and completed the transaction

These more granular conversions are referred to as "micro conversions". They are more actionable than macro conversions because they allow you to emphasize your efforts on a segregated area as opposed to trying to analyze the entire web site and tackle a large project.

Micro conversions of course do not undermine the need for macro conversions. Macro conversions should still be used to understand the pulse of the business, but the next time your macro conversion rate drops, you know where to look next.