We collect tons of data. Many silos are full of it – CRM, Google Analytics profiles, Facebook, Doubleclick & AdWords reports, YouTube channel data, email marketing system statistics, and many others. They can overwhelm any marketing team and puzzle people with a simple question: “That’s sweet, but what should I do next?”
We’d like to share some quick to-do ways to enhance your e-commerce analytics and make data-driven decisions by paying attention to micro-conversions.
Types of Micro-Conversions (with Examples)
Micro-conversions are often neglected when it comes to e-commerce data analysis, which can cause damage to your website’s performance. You should consider two main categories of micro-conversions. They are milestones for bigger goals like a checkout process and secondary useful actions that have a positive impact on business.
E-commerce milestones are also called process milestones and represent linear movement toward a primary macro-conversion. Typical actions for a conversion funnel may include:
- • Navigation to a category or subcategory,
- • Product page view,
- • Add to cart,
- • 1st and further steps in a checkout process, e.g. shipment & payment information.
The most popular e-commerce secondary micro-conversion is an email subscription to a newsletter with special offers. Other examples are:
- • Navigation to a physical store,
- • Search function on a website,
- • Product comparison,
- • Watching a video review,
- • Product review posting,
- • Social media sharing,
- • Social media subscription,
- • Email sign-up,
- • Add to a wishlist,
- • Live chat,
- • Account creation,
- • Job application for an HR department.
The aforementioned actions aren’t the primary goals of the website, but they indicate potential future macro-conversions and tend to build trust with your brand.
Defining the Goals’ Values
Valuing goals is often tricky and depends on a particular business strategy. For instance, you have an e-commerce website focused on building brand awareness. All the goals that increase the reach like email sign-up, account creation, social media sharing and subscription can be valued significantly higher than for a website with a short-term focus like sales.
The other way to think about this is to compare the accomplished secondary micro-conversions with the volume of sales. For example, the visitor watched a video review and purchased products for £100. If this spending is 30% higher than the average one, you can suppose that “watching a video review” goal can be valued at £30.
Typically, companies choose one of the following ROI metric approaches:
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- 1. Efficiency: KPI’s are measured in the percent “loss” between each step in the performance funnel, as shown below:
You can easily identify micro-conversions and then measure those that have the largest impact on your goal achievement.
- 2. Effectiveness: key activities are identified and watched out strategically. Then, different strategies are compared in order to identify the best one.
To select the most important micro-conversions, consider these points:
- • Micro-conversions should lead to a macro-conversion.
- • They should reinforce KPIs.
- • They should grow leads.
Speaking of a newsletter sign-up, the easiest way to assign a monetary value is to simply divide the total revenue, generated from the email by the number of subscribers. However, this last-click approach won’t take into account associated conversions and other multi-channel interactions. Nonetheless, for small-size enterprises, it can provide a good basic understanding of the value driven through the email channel.
Check out infographics with more examples and expert opinions:
Identifying Potential Bottlenecks
It’s a good strategy to measure the whole monetary impact of your e-commerce website taking into consideration direct sales and secondary micro-conversions. You can use them to:
- • Evaluate your traffic quality.
The quality of traffic across different traffic sources may vary. It appears that visitors engaged through a Facebook game on your page have a different level of a purchasing intent as compared with those who visit their abandoned shopping carts after receiving a triggered email. So, you need to compare like with like and monitor dynamics of a monetary value, driven by a Facebook or email campaign. This is especially useful when you work with a marketing agency and need to evaluate their performance.
- • Improve your website, app, Facebook page layout, and newsletter email’s design.
A good strategy is to establish a calendar of experiments throughout various contact points that will help you verify the hypothesis you test. Usually, the best way is to put the most influential hypothesis first in the A/B testing queue. For instance, “add to cart” button’s size/color/captions, product page layouts, links/buttons in email newsletters, checkout funnel design, etc.).
- • Set up KPIs and incentives for the team.
If you have an in-house team working on your Facebook channel, the monetary value of goals from this channel can be used to spur the efforts to the correct and measurable direction.
E-commerce businesses should pay attention to the numbers and invest some time and efforts in establishing a decent system of measurable KPIs. They should have a positive monetary impact on business or else you will steer without a dashboard. It isn’t a good idea, no matter what quantity and quality of fuel you’ve put into your car.
About the Authors
Roman Viliavin
Vice CEO
Roman Viliavin is the Vice CEO at Promodo. He has been successfully operating in digital marketing for 10+ years and already helped dozens of prominent companies increase profit from their online presence.
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