There’s a lot of focus on binary goals in business. And this being the case means that often the full picture of your marketing goals isn’t visible. Often there’s focus on a completion or non-completion of a purchase or lead gen event but less value assigned to smaller events along the way and a lot of time they are given no value.
There are plenty of steps in any website or conversion path that have values which can be calculated and used to improve upon your marketing and tracking. Actions that aren’t your ultimate action are called micro conversions.
What are micro conversions?
Micro conversions are smaller, intermediate actions that a user takes on a website or app that may not directly lead to a sale or a desired outcome. However, they are still considered valuable because they can indicate a user's level of engagement or interest. Micro conversions can serve as indicators of future conversion or as opportunities for businesses to engage with users and move them further down the funnel.
Examples of micro conversions may include actions such as signing up for a newsletter, downloading a product brochure, adding an item to a shopping cart, or completing a survey. These actions may not result in an immediate purchase, but they can provide valuable insights into a user's preferences and behaviours and help businesses tailor their marketing efforts to better meet the needs and interests of their target audience.
When setting a up client's analytics platform my standard process now is to work out every action of value and then group them into what I’ve been referring to as intent groups.
I usually have 3 intent groups outside of a final conversion. My marketing goals then work at bringing people from lower intent groups to higher intent and then finally a conversion.
For example, a clothing eCommerce brand may have the following user intent groups and micro conversion actions:
Low intent actions
- View page
- Click buttons
- Read article
- Clicks on a social button
Medium intent actions
- Search action
- Scroll % of the page
- Time spent on site
- View product
High intent actions
- Add to Cart
- Initiate Checkout
- Conversion
- Login
- Create an account
- Email sign up
With this plan in mind, I can then make sure I’m tracking all of these events in an analytics platform and then can group them in reports to see the way people move between the groups.
These groups are especially helpful in digital marketing as I can create campaigns with these specific goals in mind. For example, a low-intent ad campaign focuses on prospecting new users and getting them on the site. A medium intent campaign remarkets users who have been on the website or completed another low intent action, and then finally a high intent campaign which remarkets people from the previous step with the goal of getting them to complete a high intent action and/or converting.
Benefits of setting up micro conversions
- Micro conversions can serve as indicators of future conversion and help businesses track the effectiveness of their marketing efforts.
- Tracking micro conversions can provide valuable insights into a user's preferences and behaviors, helping businesses tailor their marketing efforts to better meet the needs and interests of their target audience.
- Micro conversions can help businesses identify areas for improvement and fine-tune their marketing strategies to better target and engage with potential customers.
- Micro conversions can serve as opportunities for businesses to engage with users and move them further down the sales funnel.
- By tracking micro-conversions, businesses can better understand how users interact with their website or app and make informed decisions about how to optimize their marketing efforts.
Visualising your intent action groups
I have found these micro conversion intent groups especially useful when visualising customer data in GA4 as you can build a custom report to see users in each of the funnel stages.
The chart below shows us how many people reach each stage of the customer journey.
Using intent action groups to compare channels
This custom funnel chart also allows us to compare channels to see which works better at each stage. We can add as many segments as we need for each channel and we can see the progression through each stage of the funnel separately.
For example, in the data above we can see that Paid Social is better at moving people from the low funnel to the medium funnel whereas Google is better at moving people from the medium to the high groups. This gives us a better understanding of how these channels can work in unison. We can then change our focus and our remarketing campaigns to reflect this in the respective channels.
In Conlusion
Viewing user data like this gives you a much better understanding of the value of your marketing efforts. It can help you reevaluate how and when you use different marketing channels and can help attribute value to things you may have been previously ignoring.
Using this method I have seen campaigns that I thought were doing poorly on social actually turn out to be machines at driving email sign ups, but as that isn't my main conversion action I was initially ignoring it which was stupid of me. Now I know that the campaign is valuable and I'm in a much better place to position it in my marketing efforts in order to drive more email sign ups.