Whilst the main focus of CRO (Conversion Rate Optimisation) is on increasing purchases, paying attention to the small steps that lead to order completion can have a bigger impact than you might think.
From revealing purchase intent, to highlighting friction points along the customer journey, tracking micro conversions allows you to see which customers are most likely to convert, and helps you to see where and why customers are dropping off.
What Are Micro-Conversions in eCommerce?
Macro conversions are the actions that directly drive revenue, the primary goal of your eCommerce site, such as purchase completion, or subscribing to a paid membership or subscription.
In comparison, micro-conversions support the customer towards macro-conversions:
- Adding a product to basket
- Interacting with the product gallery
- Using filters and/or search
- Beginning checkout
These conversions signal intent to buy, and can be analysed to optimise the journey to conversion.
How Micro-Conversions Drive Growth in eCommerce
Depending on the type of products you sell, customers can spend considerable amounts researching products, considering different options. Therefore micro-conversions tend to happen more often than macro-conversions.This can make macro-conversion rates slow to change, as customers don’t complete them as often.
Micro-conversions fuel eCommerce growth by highlighting customer intent and friction points. For example, if products get high views, but low add-to-bag rates, it might be an indication that something’s wrong, be it price, trust signals or product information presentation. Optimising these steps improves the efficiency of the funnel, which in turn increases the likelihood of users converting.
Over time, small improvements in the early stages of the customer journey can accumulate into significant gains in overall sales performance.
5 Tips for Optimising for Micro-Conversions
- A good starting point is to optimise navigation and filtering to help product discovery. Highlight recommendations, build intuitive filters, and a strong site search.
- Add to bag rate is a crucial KPI, and optimising the product page experience can be pivotal in improving this metric. Making product information relevant and helpful, including clear and varied product images, and building trust through customer reviews are strong areas to improve PDPs.
- Encourage users to take action by placing key CTAs above the fold, call attention to them, and make sure that users understand the action they will complete.
- Personalisations can be a great way to add value to the user’s experience, by creating a more custom experience, based on their behaviour. Personalised recommendations, device specific layouts and flows, and serving different content for users who display exit intent, or returning customers are great ways to build a more bespoke journey.
- Small actions can lead to great insights and opportunities, and whilst order completion might be your ecommerce site’s primary goal, it’s crucial to support your customers’ journey every step of the way.
Take a look at your site’s micro-conversions, identify points of friction and start testing improvements.
Better still, book some time with our expert team for a consultation around how we can support driving results for your experimentation programme as an extension of your team.
