What Are Micro Conversions And Why Should You Care?

When it comes to eCommerce conversions, we often thinks about sales figures and number of orders. After all, the primary objective of any eCommerce venture is to boost sales.

However, while sales or ‘macro conversions’ undoubtedly paint part of the picture, they don’t illustrate the entire customer journey. To gain a more nuanced understanding of customer behavior and to gather actionable insights, there’s a need to focus on ‘micro conversions’.

What is Micro Conversions?

Micro conversions are essentially small steps that lead users towards a primary conversion. These actions may include activities like subscribing to a newsletter, adding a product to a wish list, or just staying on a product page for a certain period of time.

Consider this - it’s not every day that a visitor will come to your eCommerce store and immediately make a purchase. The visitor might like a product, add it to the wish list, and plan to buy it later. In such cases, adding the product to the wish list is a micro conversion.

Why Micro Conversions?

One may question - why bother about micro conversions when they don’t translate into immediate sales? Here are a few reasons why micro conversions should not be ignored:

Better Understanding of User Behavior

Monitoring micro conversions lets you delve deeper into your customers’ behavior and preferences. Unlike macro conversions, which often focus solely on the end result (the sale), micro conversions provide you with a closer look at the consumer’s journey.

For instance, observing the time spent on a page can reveal which products or content visitors find engaging. Are there specific articles or products that consistently sustain longer page visits?

Similarly, tracking actions like clicking on a product for more details, reading customer reviews, or adding products to a wish list can deliver insightful data. Are there certain products that receive more interest but still don’t end up in many sales? If so, perhaps there are barriers to purchase that need to be identified and addressed.

These valuable insights can drive strategic changes in how you present your content or products, contributing to, over time, an increase in overall macro conversions.

Potential Leads for Conversion

Each micro conversion is a warm lead. These are visitors who’ve not just landed on your page but engaged with your content or products in some way. While they may not have made a purchase during that visit, their actions reveal a certain level of interest - an intent that can be nurtured into a future sale.

By identifying and tracking these leads through techniques such as remarketing, you can further engage them. You can send personalized emails with recommended products based on their wishlist, reminders of products they viewed, or incentives like discounts to prompt a return to your site and hopefully encourage a macro conversion.

Smaller eCommerce Struggles

For smaller e-commerce websites that don’t generate a large volume of sales, monitoring micro conversions can be particularly beneficial. In the early phases, or during lean periods, these sites may not have sufficient sales data to carry out deep-dive analyzes or A/B testing.

However, tracking micro conversions can provide these smaller platforms with valuable data even when the macro conversions may be lacking.

Take, for example, an emerging e-commerce business striving to establish a customer base. They may not see a large volume of sales initially. But recording micro conversions like newsletter sign-ups, user registrations, or product views can provide valuable insights.

Do the majority of their visitors sign up for the newsletter but fail to purchase? Are certain products being viewed more but are either not added to the cart or remain in the cart without leading to a sale?

By monitoring these micro-conversions, they could glean insights into possible areas of friction in the buying process that may require attention or understand what strategies may be resonating with their audience. Based on this data, they can then make necessary alterations to their offerings, engage with potential leads more effectively, or streamline their buying process, slowly growing their customer base and boosting macro conversions.

Micro Conversions and A/B Testing

A/B testing is a common practice to determine what works and what doesn’t on your website. In the context of a small eCommerce store that doesn’t generate enough sales for data relevancy, monitoring micro conversions can make A/B testing statistically significant faster.

While A/B testing with macro conversions can take time to yield results due to their sparsity, micro conversions happen more frequently, and hence can be measured more easily. This means you can quickly determine whether a test version of your page leads to a higher rate of micro conversions, and hence is more likely to improve your conversion rate overall.

Conclusion

While macro conversions are critical for your bottom line, micro conversions can provide plentiful data to understand customer behavior, improve user experience, and ultimately drive more sales. So, if you haven’t been paying attention to micro conversions yet, it might be time to start.

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