How Getting Micro Conversions Can Help Increase Sales

A sale – a macro conversion – is the ultimate goal for most.

And as such, most businesses focus on tracking these macro conversions (the conversions that are most directly tied to revenue), even though they actually provide the least useful information when it comes to increasing your sales.

After all, sales take place at the end of the funnel, so they can’t offer up a lot of valuable information.

Think about all of the small steps that occurred between a visitor initially visiting your website and finally making a purchase. These small steps eventually lead to a micro conversion (like a sale) and are therefore just as important, if not more so.

So, What are Micro Conversions?

Macro conversions are the primary conversions on your website (such as sales or lead generation sign-ups – micro conversions ultimately vary based on your type of business) while micro conversions are the smaller actions or steps that take place before a sale takes place.

While macro conversions don’t generate profit on their own, they are still important because they are steps that eventually lead to a sale.

Just like macro conversions, micro conversions can look different depending upon your business, but here are a few different examples of what we’re talking about when we refer to micro conversions:

• • Watching a Video About Your Product
  • Checking Your Pricing Information

When it comes to conversions, a lot of attention is spent tracking and optimizing a website for the final sale itself, but tracking micro conversions and optimizing your site based on this information can actually help you to increase sales.

Consider, for example, that most of your target audience is not yet ready to convert when they visit your website The average macro conversion rate is around 3 to 4%. In other words, for every 100 visitors, only 3 or 4 of them will convert.

That’s why it’s important to focus on the actions of the remaining 96 or 97%.

How Getting More Micro Conversions Can Help Increase Sales

Consider the following example of a typical conversion funnel of a SaaS website.

In the example below, visits to the home page to the features page, and visits from the features page to the price page, are micro conversions.

If you can double various micro conversions – like the number of people who open up an email from your email marketing campaign, twice as many people are also likely to make a purchase.

Ultimately, there are many reasons why tracking micro conversions is important, here are two of the most important: assessing buyer intent and determining “points of friction” in their buyer journey.

• Assessing Buyer Intent

First, tracking micro conversions can allow you to understand buyer intent. Not everyone who visits your website will be a potential customer, but those who make micro conversions are the ones who have an interest in your product and may end up purchasing your product at some point in the future.

• Determining “Points of Friction” in Buyer Journey

Not only can tracking micro conversions give you an overview of the customers that are interested in your product, but it also provides valuable information as to problems that currently exist at various stages in the conversion funnel that could be preventing potential customers from making a sale.

Typically, these issues have to do with usability.

For example, an e-commerce site that notices not as many people are going on to add a product to their cart after looking at a product page could indicate that there is a problem with the how difficult this process is.

Therefore, e-commerce sites can look at this data and then use it to come up with a plan to increase the number of people that end up clicking ‘add-to-cart.’ By improving this one single micro conversion, the e-commerce site will then increase their macro conversions (the sales) as a result.

Here’s a case study of how one business tracked their micro conversions in order to use this information to get more macro conversions: international mail order company that sells plants and garden accessories, Bakker-Hillegom, realized that visitors would read visit their information pages about gardening tips, but wouldn’t buy anything.

There was friction.

To address this, they thought that perhaps adding commercially-focused banners at the top of their information pages could result in more micro conversions.

They ran an A/B test to determine whether the addition of the commercial banners at the top, one which was a banner to a Top Deals page of their website increased engagement.

The results?

A whopping 104.99% increase to their Top Deals page of their website.

As you will see below, that’s why tracking micro conversions is the most important step to getting more micro conversions and, ultimately, more macro conversions. It gives you a starting point to assess potential problems with various aspects of your funnel.

At the end of the day, focusing on measuring only macro conversions is limited. It only tells you one thing – whether you have been profitable or not.

So, now that you have an overview of how micro conversions can help increase sales, let’s explore how to do this in a little more detail below.

How to Optimize Your Micro Conversions

First, you have to know your customer’s path to purchase by knowing: 1) who your customers are and 2) how they are getting to your site.

From here, you should know what your macro conversions are.

Then, you can create your pathway(s). Since users will end up on your site differently, you will more than likely have several different possible pathways.

Now, keep in mind that all of this is just a guess. The next step is to actually measure the pathways by tracking your micro conversions.

When it comes to tracking them, Google Analytics generally isn’t enough.

Sure, Google Analytics will provide a lot of valuable information for you to appraise the health of your website (and ultimately your business), but it won’t be able to provide more in-depth information regarding how your customers moved through each step.

A more premium option, like something offered on Kissmetrics, is needed.

Here are just a few examples of the types of micro conversions that you can track. These will be different depending on your business, but some of the important ones are often:

• • Product Information Page/Demo Video

• • Pricing Information Page
  • Competitor Comparison Page

These are just a few examples, but give you a sense of what to track.

The good rule of thumb when it comes to tracking your micro conversions is to make it simple. You want data, yes, but you also want to ensure that the data is actionable. Don’t make it more difficult on yourself by tracking too much.

How to Increase Micro Conversions

Ultimately, the micro conversions that you want to optimize will depend upon the goals of your particular website and business. However, there are also some broad micro conversions that can increase your macro conversions as well. Here are just a few examples:

• • Focus On Getting More Customer Reviews. You probably know that customer reviews are integral to your conversions. Over 90% of customers read reviews and testimonials before purchasing. You can also optimize them further; adding customer pictures to your testimonials, for example, has been shown to help increase micro-conversions. 

• • Add Explainer Videos to Your Landing Pages – the idea is that the longer you can get someone to stay on a given page, the more likely they are to go on to make a macro conversion. Studies show that landing page videos can increase conversions by 80%.

• Add Live Chat To Your Website. It has been shown that people are 3X as more likely to make a purchase from a website that has live chat. It’s also a relatively easy addition to your website. An automated option, that’s also inexpensive, is LiveChat.

You can also increase conversions by leveraging social proof and by optimizing your landing pages.

The Bottom Line

Although only 3 or 4% of your target audience will be converting at a given time, the majority of them will still be making micro conversions. That’s why it’s important to track these micro conversions and optimize your website accordingly.

Even small improvements in micro conversions can result in significantly more macro conversions.

So, in short: figure out what micro conversions are ultimately related to the primary goal of your particular website. Then, track them and make adjustments accordingly.

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