What are micro-conversions, and how can they help you in sales?

Any marketer working in the industry on a daily basis knows that an effective advertising strategy is essential to the success of any business, and these days that is no small challenge. Consumers are increasingly demanding and the market is increasingly competitive, making it a real challenge to reach the right target audience and drive valuable conversions. The key to success lies in the elements that are responsible for achieving the goals we set, namely conversions and micro conversions. Today we will focus on the latter in particular, as they are an often overlooked and highly underestimated element of marketing strategy.

Microconversion – what is it?

Going from the general to the specific, let’s first recall what a conversion is. These are all actions taken by users visiting our website or online store. What does this mean in practice? A conversion can be the download of a pdf file, the submission of a contact form, registration on the site, subscription to a newsletter, or the most popular conversion – the purchase of some product or service. Usually under conversions we choose the most relevant goals for us and our business, and then we optimize marketing activities under this. 

In the world of digital marketing there are still micro conversions. As the name suggests, these are smaller actions, but that doesn’t mean at all that they are less important. These are small but key actions taken by users on our website or online store as part of ongoing activities (e.g. an advertising campaign) that indicate engagement and interest by a potential customer, even if they do not ultimately lead to a final conversion (e.g. a transaction) yet. Such micro conversions can be, for example, 

• displaying a certain number of subpages,
• display a specific tab,
• time spent on the page,
• posting reviews,
• using the so-called magnifying glass on the website,
• adding the product to the shopping cart,
• visiting the category page,
• turning to social media, 
• various forms of contact e.g. via form or chat on the website, etc. 

There are many examples and the list could go on for a long time, but the most important thing is to tailor both conversions and micro conversions to your own business and what you actually want to achieve with your marketing strategy. 

How to configure microconversions?

When we have determined what actions are conversions and micro-conversions it is time to implement them. Here, of course, as always, I will recommend using Google Tag Manager The configuration process itself always looks the same, it just varies depending on what micro-conversion you want to measure. Below I’ll show you an example of how to configure user engagement in the form of time spent on a page. 

1. Open Google Tag Manager and select the container of interest. 
2. Create a new tag by clicking „New” on the right side of the screen.
3. Name the tag and select the tag type (e.g. Google Analytics: GA4 event).
4. Select the appropriate configuration tag (in other words, enter your GA4 data stream ID here) and name this event.

Remember to keep the naming of the events that are sent to GA4 correct. Ideally, the name should start with a lowercase letter, if you want to enter more than one word, then separate them with the so-called „floor”, and you must remember the limit of 40 characters per event name.

5. Next we click rule and create a rule based on a timer. We fill in fields such as „Break” and „Limit”.

In the „Interrupt” field, we enter every how many seconds we want to trigger our event. Note that in GTM this time is given in seconds, so if we want to report every 10 seconds we should enter 10000 milliseconds in this field.

In the „Limit” field we will set the minimum number of event calls. I recommend with a short time, e.g. 10 seconds, to set 1 event, because more will cause a huge number of events of this type and it will not give us any meaningful conclusions. 

6. It is still worth adding conditions when the rule should be satisfied. Here we can specify, for example, on which URLs of our site we want to run this event.
7. Finally, we save and publish the changes. Before we close GTM and forget about the whole thing, I still recommend going into preview mode and checking that the tag we created works exactly as we wanted and sends information to a specific marketing tool. 

How to measure and analyze microconversions? 

Correct configuration is only half of our success. The next big step we need to take to effectively use microconversions in the optimization process is proper analysis.

It is not enough here to check engagement or rejection rates in Google Analytics 4 or another analytics tool. It is necessary to define key success indicators related to micro conversions (so-called KPIs). At this point, it’s worth asking ourselves some questions that our data analysis will seek answers to. These may include, for example:

• What percentage of our site was scrolled by the user?
• How many times has a video posted on our website been played?
• How much time users spend on a given landing page?
• How often do users click on external links such as a redirect to Facebook or Linkedin?

With regular and, above all, correct analysis of micro-conversions, we will be able to catch current trends, user behavior and possible areas for improvement. It’s also worth analyzing what users do before and after micro-conversion to understand what actions can affect the achievement of business goals.

When analyzing, I recommend testing different audience segments as well. You probably realize that on the Internet, one user group does not equal another, so before you make big and drastic business decisions, test as much as you can to better understand which groups are more likely to perform micro-conversions and what actions can be taken to increase their engagement. In addition, A/B testing and analysis of content and page layout can help identify best practices and optimize the user experience to increase micro-conversions. One thing is for sure, such a strategy will definitely pay off and lead to various valuable conclusions :). 

Why is it worth measuring microconversions?

Measuring microconversions is essential for effective purchase funnel analysis. Considering at least the shopping process, measuring these conversions allows us to identify, for example, at which stage users are most likely to abandon a full conversion. In this way, we have a chance to detect and fix any imperfections on the site, and above all, we can better understand user behavior and introduce further tests, for example, in the design of our site, to increase the conversion rate. In this way, we will constantly optimize our business, we can continuously check what passes the test on our site and what does not necessarily. Besides, by seeing the steps on which the most users are rash, we can react quickly and effectively by making the most user-friendly changes for our users. 

It can be said that a micro-conversion study shows us the path that customers take toward final purchases. Let’s assume that the rate of major conversions is low, while we record a large number of micro conversions. It is the analysis of these smaller conversions that will tell us which elements on your website are worth changing, and at what stage users back off, abandoning purchases. In addition to measurement, it is also important to improve conversions, which includes measures to increase the rate and increase the number of interactions. In the e-commerce industry in particular, such a strategy has a positive impact on the level of revenue generated.

How to use micro-conversion tracking in a marketing strategy?

Using the data we gain from micro-conversion tracking and analysis is even the icing on the cake of our overall strategy. As mentioned earlier, micro-conversion analysis allows us to better understand user behavior and tailor actions to their preferences. When creating different types of campaigns, such as remarketing or mailing campaigns, microconversions play a particularly important role.

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Microconversion remarketing campaigns

For remarketing, monitoring micro-conversions, such as browsing products or adding them to a shopping cart, allows you to effectively segment your target audience. Thus, it is possible to create personalized advertising messages that relate directly to the actions taken by the user on the site. For example, if a user added a product to the shopping cart, but did not make a purchase, a remarketing campaign can focus on promoting that product to increase conversions, and we will target ads to so-called „abandoned shopping carts.” 

Mailing campaigns using microconversions

For mailing campaigns, micro-conversions such as newsletter subscriptions or downloads of handouts can provide valuable insights into recipients’ interests. By analyzing these activities, it is possible to personalize the content sent in emails, increasing the chances of successful engagement and conversions. In addition, such activities give us the opportunity to build a large audience, of which probably some large portion will remain our customers. 

Summary

When creating marketing strategies, it is of course important to keep our main goals and objectives in mind, but it is also worth spending some time looking at micro conversions. This is an equally important part of advertising campaigns and optimization efforts, because in addition to providing us with engaged users, micro-conversions can provide valuable information about the behavior of potential customers and the UX and UI of our website or online store.