3 powerful micro-conversion strategies for paid social

These days, conversions are so top priority that many companies don’t even spend money on brand awareness campaigns in their paid social strategies.

When marketers get way into the weeds with conversions, they often forget about the benefits, and long-term impact, of micro-conversions.

What are micro-conversions?

Micro-conversions signal high intent and a strong likelihood that someone will convert on our primary conversion goal, resulting in a significant improvement in conversion metrics when put to use.

Think of a micro-conversion as one small task completion, or a secondary action a website visitor takes, that indicates they will convert.

For paid social, we consider any incremental step a user takes when showing initial interest in a brand as a micro-conversion. That could be:

• Engagement with ads.
• Opening lead gen forms.
• Watching videos XX% of the time.
• Liking/following your brand pages.

A significant benefit of micro-conversions on social platforms: many are automatically tracked within platforms. All marketers have to do is leverage them.

What can you do with micro-conversions?

I’ve observed the following results using several micro-conversion strategies across social platforms:

• 60% decrease in cost-per-landing page view
• 71% decrease in cost-per-lead
• 65% increase in conversion rate

If you have the potential to significantly decrease costs and improve conversion rates with these micro-conversion strategies, why wouldn’t you test them?

Ready to learn how quick and easy micro-conversion strategies can drive results?

Here are three micro-conversion strategies to consider to drive impact on your next campaign:

1. Optimize top-of-funnel campaigns for website engagements rather than clicks

Decrease your cost-per-landing page view by optimizing for website engagements. Website engagements signal higher intent compared to link clicks. Optimizing toward users who are likely to take action on your website ultimately brings in better quality users with a higher chance of converting than those who just click. To illustrate this strategy, let’s focus on Facebook.

Here’s how to do it:

Identify landing page actions you want to track

A few actions to consider are social icon button clicks, CTA button clicks and clicks to watch videos on your website. You can also consider visits to resource pages, blog posts and case studies.

Use Facebook’s Event Setup Tool for the easiest and quickest way to set up engagement events

If you’re interested in tracking these events for other social platforms, such as LinkedIn or Twitter, place tracking tags on each action within your tag manager or directly within your website’s developer code.

You can find Facebook’s Event Setup Tool under the Events Manager in the All Tools menu. From here, you will select Add Events and then click From the Pixel.

Note: To use Facebook’s Event Setup Tool, you must have the pixel already placed across your website.

Click Open Event Setup Tool, type your website address in and click Open Website. Once you’ve done this, your landing page will open, and there will be a box to the left of your page that shows the options for using the tool.

Select Track New Button, which will allow you to start tracking those specific actions. In this example, we have selected the Contact Us button and instructed Facebook to track that under an event called “Contact.” You can continue with these steps to track and sort conversions you want to track and optimize.

Once you’ve finished tracking all the actions, just wait for the data to populate within Facebook’s Event Manager, and you’re all set to start optimizing for these events!

2. Build High-Intent Retargeting Audiences

Decrease your cost-per-lead by building high-intent retargeting audiences. You can create audiences based on specific micro-conversion actions to improve bottom-funnel conversion metrics. Instead of retargeting based on just website traffic, try retargeting based on a user’s time on specific landing pages.

Here’s how to do it:

Select Audiences under All Tools in Facebook’s Ad Manager

Create a website audience based on Time Spent

Select Custom Audience under the Create Audience drop-down menu. Next, you will select Website as your source.

Note: Take time exploring the other Customer Audience Sources. This section has tons of hidden gems useful for building high-intent audience segments based on micro-conversion actions. For example, you can implement retargeting based on users who have viewed or added specific products from your product catalog.

Under the Events drop-down menu, select Visitors by Time Spent

This option will give you a secondary choice to pick a select group of users based on the percentile of the average time spent on site. I recommend starting with 25% since that will give you the most sizable audience. If 25% works well, you may consider testing the other options.

Test and optimize your audience

Once your audience has populated, add it to an Ad Set to begin testing against conversion tactics. Test against a lookalike or an interest-based prospecting segment to compare performance.

3. Capture missed leads

Increase conversion rates by capturing missed leads. Using micro-conversions, you can track users who opened a lead gen form ad or began to fill out a form on your website. We can then take them back a step and offer more resources and brand education to help them convert at the bottom of the funnel.

To illustrate this strategy, we’ll focus on LinkedIn and Facebook.

Here’s how to do it:

Find your lead gen micro-conversions within the ad account.

LinkedIn and Facebook both have Lead Gen ad formats that automatically track users who open or submit forms, making it easier to track and retarget them. Navigate to the Audience section within the Ad Manager accounts on both platforms.

On Facebook, you will select Custom Audience and use the Meta Source Lead Form. You will choose Lead Gen Form on LinkedIn under the Create Audience dropdown menu.

Note: You can also use the same method in strategy #2 above to track form actions on your website via Facebook’s Event Setup Tool or by placing tags directly on your website’s forms.

Build your micro-conversion audience segments.

You can choose to create your audience based on users who opened or users who submitted the form. We want to focus on users who opened a form but didn’t submit for this micro-conversion.

On Facebook, we can only target form opens; however, on LinkedIn, you will have to create an audience specific to people who submitted the form and exclude that from your audience of form opens.

Test and learn from your segments

Once you’ve created your form open segments, just wait for them to populate in each platform, and then you can begin testing.

Try serving these segments with educational content, such as case studies, blog posts and other resources from your website that will push them closer to converting.

While they seem like minuscule actions, micro-conversions give us meaningful data to drive better results. Implementing these long-term enables micro-conversions to become more powerful and valuable in your optimization efforts.

Test micro-conversions for yourself

With social advertising becoming increasingly competitive, it’s so important to take advantage of available capabilities and data to maximize performance. Micro-conversions are a small but powerful piece of solving those efficiency gaps.