Do you want more leads from your website?  Of course you do (we all do)! 

As you think about your website, what constitutes a conversion or a lead? These days, few business owners are satisfied with increased impressions, visitors or clicks.  Most want one thing - more leads. And while it's good to start with the end in mind, placing all of your emphasis on more leads can actually result in lower performance than if you had put some of your focus further up the lead funnel. In addition to leads, what you should also be tracking and trying to increase/improve is micro-conversions - the events/actions that take place before a lead is received.

Here's a graphic to illustrate the concept of micro-conversions vs. macro-conversions:

For the purposes of this blog posting, let's assume that you've already identified what your goals/conversions are and you're at least tracking them with Google Analytics (if you haven't established goals for your business and are not tracking your website, let's talk!). 

Suppose you're doing direct mail and the goal of the campaign is to increase inquiries to your business - either via phone or online.  The direct mail piece has two calls to action - "Call Today" and "Visit Our Website" (let's not debate the quality of these calls to action).  When someone receives the direct mail piece, you're hoping that they call you or visit your website and then call or fill out an online lead capture form.

It would be nice if this happened immediately, but real life doesn't always work out so cleanly.  Unless you have a (relatively) small ticket item, it might take someone receiving your direct mail piece several visits to your website before they'd even consider contacting you.  Think of yourself as a consumer - have you ever gone through this process yourself?  I'll bet you have!

As you think about your website as if it were a sales funnel, you can dramatically increase your website conversion rates if you identify your micro-conversions as well as track your macro-conversions.  Use your analytics tools like Google Analytics to help you identify the actions taken by visitors that (eventually) become macro-conversions.

Then create tests to try and get more visitors to complete more micro-conversions.  Think about the whole process as a funnel and do your best to remove friction throughout the process.  Make sure that your marketing programs have a "multi-channel" aspect to them so that someone who receives your direct mail piece is quickly followed up with and encouraged to checkout your monthly email newsletter or view your weekly webinar (don't have a monthly email newsletter or a webinar, let's talk!).

The takeaway here is simple - you can (dramatically) increase the number of web leads you receive each month by monitoring and tracking micro-conversions as well as macro-conversions.  When measuring the success of a marketing campaign, don't put all of your emphasis on leads.  Focus instead on engagement - getting the recipients of your piece to take action - and make sure that the action they take is pulling them down the funnel toward what you really want them to do!

To learn more about setting up tracking on your website, identifying conversions and micro-conversions, poke around our website, sign-up for our monthly email newsletter or drop us a line.

Analytics guru Avinash Kaushik articulated micro-conversions and inspired this blog posting!

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