Many professionals fixate on conversion rates, treating this prized statistic as the ultimate measure of a platform’s success. But the journey to a macro-conversion—a process teeming with interactions and experiences—is often distilled to a mere percentage, which stands at around 2% for most scenarios, disregarding the intricate processes leading to that final figure.
Industry innovators have begun to advocate for a nuanced understanding of conversions, emphasizing the need to analyze the journey a user takes towards a conversion, and in doing so, they have introduced an emerging focus on micro-conversions.
Understanding Micro-Conversions
Consider the analogy of constructing a building: it’s the quality of the individual bricks that dictates the building’s durability. Aligning with this concept, optimizing micro-conversions emphasizes the significance of the small, yet crucial, steps that lead up to the ultimate goal.
Micro-conversions are commonly divided into two types: process milestones and secondary actions. Process milestones are direct contributors to achieving the main conversion goal, much like in an online store where each step from product selection to checkout is critical. These steps can be further broken down and optimized individually for an enhanced user experience.
Secondary actions, while not directly involved in the main conversion pathway, serve as indicative behaviors hinting at a user’s likelihood to convert. Actions such as subscribing to newsletters or sharing content on social media fall into this category.
Micro-conversions offer a more detailed view of user engagement, allowing designers to refine each component for peak performance. This targeted approach simplifies testing, as each element can be evaluated individually for its effectiveness within the user experience. Although micro-conversions seem to bridge the gaps left by traditional conversion rate metrics, over-optimization can prove counterproductive.
Challenges with Micro-Conversions
While micro-conversions provide valuable insights into user interaction and design efficacy, an exclusive focus on these metrics can overshadow the holistic view of the user journey. This narrow focus can lead to skewed or incomplete data interpretation, as illustrated by marketing expert Chris Goward. He describes a scenario where a company focuses on micro-conversions through A/B testing on their homepage, aiming to drive visitors toward a download page.
Preliminary results might show one variation driving a high number of micro-conversions to the download page.
Yet, further testing reveals that what seems optimal for one micro-conversion step might not translate into the highest macro-conversion rate. This exemplifies how an exclusive focus on micro-conversions can detract from the integral objective—achieving the primary conversion goal.
Seeking a Better Performance Indicator
The crux of the issue is not to neglect conversion rates or micro-conversion analytics, but to acknowledge that an obsession with these numbers might not be the recipe for website optimization. Goward supports a financial-based metric, urging for a focus on revenue-driving figures such as sales or long-term customer subscriptions.
There is no definitive metric suitable for all websites; however, it’s likely that neither conversion rates nor micro-conversions alone offer the complete picture. While invaluable for garnering insights, they should be balanced with a broad perspective to inform any major UX decisions.
