Conversion – the one metric that make sense to all publishers and internet marketers. But often we forget to monitor the path, actions and behaviours that led to the conversion. The small steps that eventually led to conversion are called Micro-Conversions.
Qualitative Micro Conversions: Micro Conversions can be broadly categorized based on the visitor’s action. Actions that doesn’t directly contribute to your revenue but which would eventually lead to revenue generation are called Qualitative Micro-Conversions.
Some Qualitative Micro Conversions are “Tweeting about your article”, “Liking your article on Facebook”, “+1 ing your article on Google Plus” and “Digging your article”.
Quantitative Micro Conversions: Quantitative Micro-Conversions as the name suggests can be measured and are much closer to conversion. “Clicks on a Banner Ad”, “Subscribing to your newsletter” and “Subscribing to your RSS Feed” are example of Quantitative Micro-Conversions. If you have configured your analytics to measure the number of RSS readers or subscribers, it is very easy to measure the total numbers from those marketing channels that eventually converted.
If for every 100 subscribers 12 of them bought your product/service, then invest resources to improve subscription rate in your pages. Similarly, if you are aware that for every 20 clicks on your Special Promo Code Banner Ad, one sale happens, then focus on improving the impressions on the Ads.
Businesses that generate revenue with lead generation consider “Subscription” as a conversion. For the traditional Brick and Mortar or online Business, these actions are micro-conversions.
Path Based Micro Conversions: are little tricky. The persona and the web design influence the path of the visitor. But if the visitor checks the Pricing and Plans page then it is a path based Micro-Conversion. That was the planned path for which you were optimizing. Even if the visitor doesn’t buy your product/services, your web design has enabled Path Based Micro-Conversion.
Visit Based Micro Conversions: The characteristics of the visit influence the conversion. If you know that after fourth visit, the probability to buy your products/services improve by 75% then 2nd and 3rd visits are Visit Based Micro-Conversions. Assign appropriate value to the visit. Other characteristics of the visit like time on page, time on site, exit rate and bounce rate can also be categorized under Visit Based Micro Conversions.
Source Based Micro Conversions: Traffic source influences the behaviour of the visitor. Search Engine users have a specific problem to solve. Will your product/service or articles help them?
Social Media Users have a different information consumption pattern. Their behaviour is influenced by the recommender’s credibility. If the link is recommended by an expert in a particular domain, the likelihood that the visit will eventually lead to a conversion is very high. The first visit might lead to Qualitative (retweet, like or +1) or Quantitative Conversion (“Subscription”). But for many Businesses the first visits would hardly lead to any conversion but you just might have earned a brand evangelist. Assign a value to the Social Media visits
Similarly, conversion on links mentioned in blogs is also influenced by the authority of the blogger. Which traffic source is worth your attention? The visits are Source Based Micro-Conversions if you can track the complete life cycle of a user’s visits.
If you want expert help in Setting up Conversion Metrics, contact us or you can call us at: India (Ph): +91 9497189032, UK (Ph): +44 (0)20-3371-9976 or US (Ph): +1 650-491-0004
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