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April 22, 2014: What is a micro-conversion? It’s an action taken by people on your site that falls short of a primary conversion (such as filling out a contact form or ordering a product) but is still meaningful enough to track.
Why are micro-conversions important? Because many businesses do more than one thing, and people searching for, and landing on a given product or service page may be very different. For example, at Didit, we sell many different services (SEO, Social Media, Traditional Media, etc.). The audience for visitors to, say an SEO area is likely going to be different from a visitor to a social media page.
Because each landing page constitutes its own microcosm of behavior, visibility on search engines, and social popularity, each deserves to be analyzed and optimized individually to cater to the tastes and characteristics of each audience. This means setting up Goal Tracking not just on your primary conversion “thank you” page, but on pages leading into this main conversion area.
By tracking, aggregating, and visualizing footsteps (or “click steps”) that users take prior to reaching your primary conversion page, you can identify:
1. Weak areas in your web sites that need improvement.
2. Service offerings that may be more popular than you think.
3. Areas that you once had high hopes that might be eliminated in favor of more popular products and services.
Setting up Goals to track micro-conversions is a fairly straightforward matter in Google Analytics. Just click on the Admin tab, navigate to your property, and choose the pages you want to track as Goals. GA allows uses to set up to 20 Goals for each property – this is more than enough for most B2B sites (but obviously inadequate for B2C sites with hundreds or thousands of SKUs – for this you’ll need something higher-powered. B2Bs sites can count any visit to technical page, whitepaper download page, client page, investor relations, or about page as the fulfillment of a secondary goal.
Once you set up your micro-conversion goal tracking correctly, and start capturing some data, you’ll be rewarded with multiple “aha!” moments. You’ll begin to be able to visualize how each component part of your site works together, and how each component responds to outside events, including any outward bound media efforts your making, external PR hits, and social media visibility. The many insights you’ll gain from mastering micro-conversions can be used to improve your site experience for your users, and – most importantly for any business – to gently guide people to where you really want them: in your primary conversion area.
TIP: Watch Your REGEX. If your goals aren’t working correctly, and you’re capturing no data, the odds are that simple syntax errors may be to blame. Pay careful attention to the various match types (Page matches, Page Contains, Equals/Does Not Equal Regex) required, and be ready to type in escape characters when necessary. (This will not be a problem for code people, but you may not be a code person).
Have a question about web analytics? Contact us.
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