Improving Paid Search Performance With Micro-Conversions

Google Ads accounts largely revolve around primary conversion events such as purchases, form submissions, or phone calls.

These conversions track the main goals of the business and provide the best evidence of the performance of your Google Ads account. But solely relying upon them could be limiting the potential of your paid search performance.

To drive forward campaign performance, consider Micro conversions. Smaller actions made by users indicate their engagement or interest in your product or service. Offering valuable insights into how a user interacts with your paid marketing and significantly boost your captured conversion data.

What are micro conversions?

Micro conversions are secondary actions that indicate a user is moving towards conversion. These conversions don’t directly reflect the ultimate business goals, i.e. purchases, form submissions, but the provided data can be invaluable, especially for more top-of-funnel strategies.

Google Ads Micro Conversions include:

• Engaged sessions
• Visiting multiple pages in a session
• Viewing a specific product, category or information page
• Adding a product to the shopping cart
• Watching a video
• Newsletter sign-ups
• Brochure or catalogue downloads
• Engagement with features (e.g. live chat)

Why Use Micro Conversions In Google Ads?

1. Improve bidding efficiency with increased conversion data
   
   Google’s bidding algorithms rely upon data to drive learning and optimisation. When main conversions are more infrequent such as in B2B business or for more high-ticket products and services, the algorithm can be starved of data, limiting optimisation.
   
   Incorporating micro conversions can provide a number of valuable data points:
   
   – Identifying regular data patterns made by users before converting
   – Recognize valuable traffic earlier in the conversion funnel
   – Optimise towards users who are likely to be future converters
2. Identify Audience Segmentations
   
   Micro conversions allow for the creation of remarketing and intent audiences based around actions taken on your website, rather than generic site visit data.
   
   For example:
   
   – Users who viewed multiple products or navigated the site but did not convert
   – Visitors who abandon checkout
   – Viewers who engaged significantly with the site, or downloaded a product brochure
   
   The captured audiences can be used to remarket to potential customers with tailored messaging to their position within the marketing funnel
3. Improve bidding strategy efficiency
   
   If/when primary conversions are low, Smart Bidding strategies such as Target CPA or Maximize Conversions may struggle to perform efficiently due to a lack of data to optimise from. Micro conversions can act step in as data replacements for campaigns, especially when used as:
   
   – Secondary conversion actions – where you can optimise from the data manually
   – Use as temporary primary goals on top of funnel campaigns, such as YouTube , Demand
   – Gen or top of funnel search campaigns
   
   Allow adjustments to audience targeting and exclusions
   
   This results in better campaign performance both during the learning phase and for long term improved performance.
4. Improve funnel visibility
   
   Micro conversions allow you to see where users are dropping off. Increased visibility allows for better decision making for the CRO process and is extremely useful for removing bottlenecks and barriers for conversion.
   
   For example:
   
   – 10,000 users land on the site
   – 4,000 view product pages
   – 500 add items to the cart
   – 50 complete a purchase

From this, you can deduce that products/services are easily discoverable, but conversion issues may exist in the checkout process. Such insights are crucial for refining landing pages, call-to-actions, and remarketing flows.

Setting up micro conversions

• Identify Meaningful Website Actions: Define actions that show purchase intent or engagement. Focus on user behavior that logically may precede primary conversion. Such as a click on an email link or a download of a brochure.
• Track via Google Tag Manager or GA4: Set up custom events using Google Tag Manager or through the GA4 Events. Ensure each micro conversion is consistently tracked.
• Import Micro Conversions into Google Ads
  
  In Google Ads, navigate to Tools > Conversions > New Conversion Action
  Choose Import from Google Analytics (GA4) or configure manually via GTM
  Clearly label micro conversions for easy reporting and management
• Set As A Secondary Action Before Primary: Add micro conversions as secondary actions in your campaigns. Use this data to analyse actions which are occurring before a main conversion goal is completed. Include them in automated bidding strategies when necessary.