How to identify the right micro conversion goals for your website using Google Analytics
A beginner’s guide to tracking micro and macro conversions
In the past year, we’ve interviewed more than 100 small business owners. Almost all of them agree on one fact — at the end of the day, it’s all about conversion.
Nothing matters unless it converts. Conversion is the only reason your digital marketing exists in the first place.
However, many business owners do not know that conversions can be divided into what digital analysts call micro conversions and macro conversions.
A macro conversion is what you traditionally think of when you hear the word “conversion.” The importance of tracking macro conversions is a no-brainer: after all, it is the ultimate goal of your website, whether that’s making a purchase or filling out a lead form. For ecommerce businesses that sell products on their website, for example, it would be product purchases.
A micro conversion, on the other hand, would be actions that a prospect can take that brings them closer to the macro conversion on their digital customer journey. This means that most micro conversions are indicators of interest, such as subscribing to your newsletter, spending a certain amount of time on a lead page, or clicking on a product page.
So why should you care about tracking micro conversions?
Because micro conversions measure the early engagement actions of a customer’s digital journey before a purchase, which are not captured by macro conversions.
If you don’t track how your users are “micro converting” to important engagement actions on your website, you can’t fix these friction points. And if you don’t fix these friction points, you are literally leaving money on the table.
In this article, we’ll cover:
- How to Select the Right Micro and Macro Conversions for your Business
- How to Track Micro and Macro Conversion Goals on Google Analytics
- Next Steps
How to Select the Right Micro and Macro Conversions for your Business
For most businesses, selecting the right macro conversions is fairly straightforward. After all, macro conversions simply reflect the company’s key business objectives.
For ecommerce businesses, this is usually product purchase completions. For other businesses (e.g. SaaS or B2B), this might be app downloads, lead form submissions, creating a new account, or free trial signups. This is why you have a website at all, and it usually has to do with the bottom line of your business.
However, buying may not be the only reason your users are coming to your website. Other reasons for visiting your website may include:
- Information and research for your product or service
- Customer or technical support
- Reading or watching your content
- Signing up for your jobs list
These user activities, while not immediately serving your business objective (i.e. your macro conversion), still have value for your business. As such, you should set micro conversions for these other user interactions, which may build trust and credibility with prospects.
So the principle behind selecting your micro conversions is simply to identify the main conversion funnels, i.e. the series of user actions, that bring prospects closer to their macro conversion.
Step 1: Write down a list of potential macro and micro conversions
First write down your main 2–3 business objectives. For example, a business objective can be to increase ecommerce sales for a new product.
Next, write the corresponding macro conversion for each business objective. This should be a trackable Goal on Google Analytics (e.g. a destination goal for the purchase confirmation page).
Then write down 2–3 corresponding micro conversions that lead to each macro conversion (e.g. clicking on the “Shop Now” button on the home page).
For example, for many of our ecommerce clients, the main conversion funnel looks something this:
Home Page >> [click on “Shop Now” button] >> Product Gallery Page >> [click on a product] >> Product Page >> [click on “Add to Cart” button] >> [click on “Checkout” button] >> Checkout Process >> Purchase Confirmation
You can use our Micro/Macro Conversion Goals Template (a public Google Doc) to get started:
Step 2: Check the behavior flow report on Google Analytics to validate this funnel
Go to the Behavior Flow report on Google Analytics (Behavior >> Behavior Flow). Use this report to see if the funnel you had in mind is the way that most of your users are actually flowing through your website.
Start with your best landing pages by traffic and engagement (most sessions, lowest bounce rate, highest average session duration, etc). Then look at your exit pages to see where people are dropping off. You may be surprised to discover unexpected behavior flows from and to pages that you did not expect.
For example, you may find in your Behavior Flow report that 60% of your website users go to your Shop page by clicking on the “Shop Now” button. Then 50% of these users go to a product page. Then 30% of the remaining users go to the Checkout page.
Therefore, the main user flow for this website is:
Home >> Shop Page >> Product Page >> Checkout
You then want to set micro conversions for each step of the process (e.g. clicking on the “Shop” button).
If you really want to verify the best sequence of micro conversions, on-site user surveys are one of the most scalable options to investigate how users are really getting to your macro conversion. Learn more about user surveys with Avinash Kaushik’s article on the 3 most important questions to ask in a website survey.
Now that we’ve explained how to select the right micro and macro conversion goals based on your Behavior Flow data, let’s talk about how to set it up in Google Analytics.
How to Track Micro and Macro Conversion Goals on Google Analytics
As we explained in our tutorial on setting up Goals in Google Analytics, there are 4 types of Google Analytics Goals:
- Destination: the user visits a certain web page (or app screen).
- Duration: the user spends a certain minimum amount of time on your website (or app).
- Pages/Screens per session: the user views a certain minimum number of pages (or screens).
- Event: the user performs a certain action, such as clicking on a button.
You can set up Goals for page visits without using Google Tag Manager. You can find Goals in Admin >> View >> Goals >> New Goal button. You can create up to 20 goals for each website property. Learn more about how to set up Goals in our Goals setup tutorial:
Step 1: Set up destination goals and goal funnels for the micro/macro conversions that represent page visits.
Destination Goals are often ideal for macro conversions such as purchase completions, because you can simply use the URL of your purchase confirmation page (or thank you page) to set up a destination Goal.
You can then build a conversion Goal Funnel with a sequence of destination Goals. Currently, Google Analytics only supports Goal Funnels with destination Goals. Check out our tutorial on how to set up Goal Funnels here:
Step 2: Set up event goals, duration goals, and pages/session for your other micro conversions
Unlike macro conversions, engagement-related micro conversions are sometimes Event Goals such as button clicks. For example, some of your micro conversions may include clicking on a “Shop Now” button or submitting a form.
To track these kinds of micro conversions with Event Goals, you need to create tags with Google Tag Manager. You can add the tag directly into the headers of your website, but we recommend using Google Tag Manager to centralize your event tracking and tag management.
Check out our tutorial on event tracking with Google Tag Manager here:
Once you’ve set up your Event Goals, set up any micro conversions that are Duration Goals or Pages/Session Goals. These micro conversions are especially useful for adding highly-engaged visitors to audiences or retargeting lists for Google Adwords campaigns.
For example, you can set up a micro conversion Goal such that if a user visits more than 3 pages and spends more than 2 minutes on a lead page, Adwords will add them to a retargeting list (because I see these visitors as “hot leads”). Adwords can then automatically retarget them with display ads and Gmail ads.
Step 3: Plan a weekly workflow to monitor your micro/macro conversion goals
Once you have all the tags set up to track conversions, it’s time to implement a weekly workflow to monitor your conversion metrics.
I would recommend setting aside at least 30 minutes at the end of every week to review your micro and macro conversion metrics in your Goals reports under Conversions (Goals Overview, Funnel Visualization, Goal Flow).
You can even configure Google Analytics to email you and your colleagues these reports at a set time every week. You may want to schedule reports to be sent to the relevant executives, managers, and IT teams.
Based on this information, you can use our Analyze-Act-Monitor framework to turn these conversion metrics into action steps to improve your business.
Here are some questions to get you started:
- Which audiences have the highest conversion rates for your micro and macro conversions? Refine your audiences accordingly.
- Which channels have the highest conversion rates for your micro conversions? Adjust your ad spend per channel accordingly (reallocate more ad spend behind higher performing channels).
- What landing pages have the highest micro conversion rates? Optimize your website UX design accordingly.
Next Steps
As you can tell, selecting and tracking your micro and macro conversion is not a trivial exercise. It takes a serious amount of time and learning to test, monitor, and iterate your conversion goals to make sure you have the right goals on Google Analytics.
That’s why at Humanlytics, we’ve been helping a few dozen businesses set up the right micro and macro conversions on Google Analytics by analyzing their digital marketing data. Many of these businesses are led by very smart and technical cofounders. But even these entrepreneurs who are trained in digital marketing and data analytics often don’t have the bandwidth or resources to set up their conversion goals correctly with a data-driven process.
This is the reason we decided to build an AI-based conversion recommendation tool as the first feature of our marketing analytics platform. Setting up the right conversion goals was such a common pain point among our clients and beta testers that we felt compelled to solve this problem first.
The tool simply takes your Google Analytics data and uses AI on the back-end to recommend and setup the conversion metrics (and target numbers) that are most relevant to your business. In other words, the tool automates everything we’ve explained in this tutorial so you can spend less time learning this stuff through trial-and-error, and more time doing what you do best — running your business.
If you’re interested in beta testing this feature for free (or need help setting up your conversion goals), shoot me an email at patrick@humanlytics.co. Thanks!
Action Steps
- Create a micro/macro conversion goals document with your main 2–3 business objectives, macro conversions, and corresponding micro conversions. Use our template to get started.
- Use our Google Tag Manager tutorial to track event micro conversions such as button clicks.
- Spend 30 minutes at the end of every week reviewing your micro and macro conversion metrics in your Goals reports under Conversions (Goals Overview, Funnel Visualization, Goal Flow). Refine your audience, adjust your channel ad spend, and optimize your website design based on these conversion reports. Then repeat the Anazlye-Act-Monitor cycle.
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