Conversions in Digital Marketing

What is a conversion

Conversion is a specific action a user performs on a website. Usually, this action has some value for the site owner. A visitor may submit a form, make a phone call or complete a checkout. All of those actions, while being transitional broadly speaking, are related to the final goal of any commercial website — attracting a paying customer.

Why we need conversions

Conversions are used in digital marketing to gauge performance of a website and marketing activities. To track conversions analytics services are used. No doubt, the most broadly used is Google Analytics.

Conversion tracking gives answers to questions like:

• How many leads / calls / sales did we get?
• What marketing channel did perform well?
• Which campaigns did have good results and which did not?

Conversion tracking becomes especially important when it comes to PPC. Unlike other sources, PPC provides us with detailed data about our traffic (clicks count, prices, etc.). Working with web-analytics we confront all the data in Google Analytics reports in order to evaluate the performance of PPC.

Types of conversions

Not all conversions are equally valuable, thus it is a good practice to separate more important actions from less important.

Macro goals

A macro conversion is an action that is close to the bottom of the funnel goal (usually it is a sale). Let’s have a look at a simple funnel for a company running PPC:

A user sees the ad → clicks the ad → looks through the website → visits “Contact Us” page → submits a contact form.

Submitting a form in such funnel is the final goal, after which user’s interaction with the website is finished. In the global customer attraction funnels it’s a transitional action, since there is a lot of other actions needed to be done by the sales team. But for the website funnel it is the final goal — macro conversion.

Among other macro goals are:

• checkout (online store),
• incoming call (service provider),
• sign-up (SaaS).

Micro goals

Like macro goals are transitional steps in the global marketing funnel, so micro conversions are transitional in the website funnel. Usually, they are predecessors to macro goals. For example a person can not submit a form before scrolling to the bottom of the page where it is located. As well, as a website visitor can not complete checkout before adding items to cart.

So the concept of micro conversions is to evaluate the user engagement on the website and to determine how likely the website visitors are to convert to a prospect.

Not using micro conversions isn’t critical, since they per se don’t have significant value. However, tracking micro goals can be beneficial on websites with small number of macro goals.

Here are some examples of micro conversions:

• pageviews > 3,
• visiting a particular page,
• clicking an external link,
• scrolling to a specific element.