What a micro-conversion is
The path to a purchase is made of many steps: the shopper sees a product, opens the page, looks at
the photos, reads the reviews, adds it to the cart, completes the order. Each of those actions is a
potential measurement point. The ones that happen before the final goal are micro-conversions.
Typical e-commerce micro-conversions:
– A click on a recommendation widget
– An add to cart
– An add to wishlist
– Viewing reviews and photos
– Checkout started
– Subscribing to a back-in-stock alert
Why measure them
Funnel diagnostics. If 15% of users add to cart but only 2% buy, the problem is in checkout.
Micro-conversions show exactly where the funnel leaks.
A proxy in A/B tests. At low traffic there are not enough final purchases to reach significance.
If a change lifts add to cart significantly, that is a signal the test is moving in the right
direction. But the proxy has to be validated: confirm that a rise in add to cart has historically
correlated with a rise in purchases.
Important: do not optimise directly for a micro-conversion without checking its correlation
with the macro one. An aggressive “add to cart” popup can raise add-to-cart rate while lowering
final conversion — because users are irritated.
Use in personalization
Clicks on recommendation widgets are the classic micro-conversion used to judge recommendation
quality. A high widget CTR says the recommended products are relevant. Combined with attributed
revenue, it gives the full picture of how well an algorithm performs.