Inside Google Ads podcast: Episode 39 - Micro-conversions
I've been seeing a lot of buzz lately about micro-conversions, and it's something we haven't really dug into here before.
Micro-conversions!
A micro-conversion is one of the necessary actions that someone takes before converting. For example, “add to cart” is a micro-conversion because someone must put a product in their cart before they can purchase. “Providing billing and shipping details” would also be a micro-conversion since you must do that in the checkout process before purchasing.
For lead generation, a micro-conversion might be “visiting the contact page,” if that's the only place where your lead form lives, or “starting to enter text into the lead form.” A user can't submit the lead form until they've entered their information.
So why do we care? Why do micro-conversions matter?
In scenarios where you don't have sufficient budget to drive enough conversions to get Smart Bidding to work, micro-conversions are the solution. Maybe you can only afford to get 5 conversions per month from your campaign. But for every purchase, you have 3 “add to carts.” By counting these “add to carts” as micro-conversions, as a Primary conversion action in your campaign, you'll now have 20 data points rather than just 5 data points to train your Smart Bidding algorithm. 5 purchases + 15 “add to carts.”
True, an “add to cart” isn't a purchase, but those 15 people who “added to cart” are much more likely to be your ideal customers, or similar to your ideal customers, than the hundreds of other people who visited your website and not only didn't purchase, but didn't even take that first step of “adding to cart.”
That's my preamble, what micro-conversions are and why they matter.
Now, let's get to your burning questions about micro-conversions.
I'm your host, Jyll Saskin Gales. I spent six years working for big brands at Google, and now I work for you.
This is Inside Google Ads, Episode 39: Micro-conversions.
Our first question comes from Lou on Threads, and they ask, do you need to convince clients it's okay for ad spend to not be directly tied to a purchase conversion in the beginning? This is in response to a post I did there about how with Shopping ads, I recommend launching a Shopping campaign with “add to carts” as a micro-conversion.
So if your client is the kind of client who will look in the account a lot and the first thing you need to check every morning is the Change History to see if they've done anything overnight, then yes, you need to educate your client and explain your reasoning and get them to promise not to touch it.
If you have a more hands-off client who doesn't really care how the sausage gets made, they just want to see the results, then no, I probably wouldn't try to explain micro-conversions.
I would ensure that I have some kind of easy-to-access dashboard, perhaps in Google Analytics or Looker Studio rather than Google Ads, regardless of what kind of client I have. And there, I would want to show them only real purchases, real ROAS, etc..
Inside Google Ads is exclusively sponsored by Optmyzr, one of the leading automation PPC management suites to help you run your Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and paid social ads.
Thanks to Optmyzr, I can continue to bring you this podcast for free every week so we can continue to get your burning Google Ads questions answered.
In preparation for Q4, Optmyzr is sharing new data to help you achieve the best results from your ads. Do you know what factors have the strongest correlation with Smart Bidding success? It's not budget!
It's conversion volume and conversion values. This is exactly why I advocate for things like micro-conversions to ensure you're setting up your Smart Bidding for success. And it's great to see hard data backing based on more than 10,000 global ad accounts to validate this. And by the way, it is a great coincidence that I was already planning to do this episode about micro-conversions. You can learn more on the Optmyzr blog at optmyzr.com/blog. That's Optmyzr, O-P-T-M-Y-Z-R.com/blog or simply follow the link in the episode description.
Our next question comes from Nikolina Tomaskovic on LinkedIn, and they say, question, when micro-conversions are removed, doesn't it confuse the algorithm? Because it has data for micro-conversions, for example, people just open the contact form, but maybe not potential clients. And then suddenly it has to find those who will do other conversion actions, like people actually sending the message.
You could see a performance drop when micro-conversions are removed. But the key is to keep those micro-conversions in place until you have enough real conversion data to power your Smart Bidding algorithm.
My advice is usually 30 in 30 (30 conversions in 30 days). But those Optmyzr studies I mentioned actually found that campaigns with at least 50 conversions in 30 days see the best results. All the more reason micro-conversions are important, so you shouldn't remove the micro-conversions from your campaign conversion tracking until they've done their job. And their job is to get you the real conversions, and enough real conversions to power Smart Bidding.
Typically, I don't see a fluctuation in results when they are removed, although I'm sure it could happen. The key is that you have to ensure you're picking a micro-conversion that must happen before conversion, rather than a useful but potentially unrelated micro-conversion, like “subscribing to a free newsletter” or “visiting the contact page,” if your lead form is also featured prominently on your homepage.
So you may get to a point where you have 100 or 150 micro-conversions. Keep them in there until you have a bare minimum of 30 real conversions in 30 days. And then at that point, or maybe you want to wait more until 50 or 60, you can remove that micro-conversion, but it will have enough data about the right kind of user that it should be able to continue getting you those real 30 conversions a month.
To learn more expert tips for getting better performance from your Google Ads, like how to effectively use micro-conversions, check out my signature membership course Inside Google Ads. It's where I not only tell you, but show you everything I know about running Google Ads profitably. Plus, members get exclusive access to a one-hour monthly call with me and top industry experts. Learn more about Inside Google Ads on my website, learn.jyll.ca, that's J-Y-L-L dot C-A, or simply follow the link in the episode description.
Our final question today comes from Sweta Siddu on LinkedIn, and they ask, do you recommend using Enhanced Conversion?
Yes, I do!
Our guest expert in Episode 29 shared more about the mechanics of Enhanced Conversions. But basically, enhanced conversions combine Customer Match with conversion tracking.
That's a Jyll explanation, by the way, not an official Google explanation. But when you implement Enhanced Conversions, either through the Google Tag or Google Tag Manager or the Google Ads API, when someone converts on your website, Google will capture additional first-party data about them to match with what it knows about them.
For lead gen, Enhanced Conversions can be used either instead of, or alongside offline conversion tracking, and the benefit is improved tracking and improved accuracy, so you'll have a better idea of how your campaigns are performing and Google will too. It can optimize your bidding and your targeting more effectively.
For ecommerce, Enhanced Conversions work similarly and let you match the first-party data you capture about the user with the data that Google may know about them. For example, if they're currently signed into Google on their Chrome browser. With privacy regulations and consent banners and all kinds of stuff making conversion tracking less durable, less accurate, and harder to maintain, Enhanced Conversions is like a stopgap that prevents some of that data from escaping.
Is it necessary to run Google Ads? No. I would say that the vast majority of small businesses I see do not use Enhanced Conversions. And of all the things to focus on, would this make my top 5 list with them? Probably not.
But if you offer Google Ads management services, you should implement Enhanced Conversions for all of your clients. It has no drawback and can only benefit you by showing more conversion data attributable to Google Ads, and that benefits your client as well as providing better inputs for their campaigns to optimize.
Should you use micro-conversions in Google Ads?
If your campaigns are not meeting your performance goals and you aren't getting the bare minimum, 30 conversions in 30 days, then yes, you should use micro-conversions.
If your campaigns are not meeting your performance goals and you're getting between 30 to 60 conversions in 30 days, micro-conversions may help. It's worth testing.
If you're already getting 60 or more conversions in 30 days, though, then micro-conversions probably won't help you, and you’ve got to try some other things to fix your performance.
If you only get 5 or 10 conversions per month, but your campaigns are meeting your goals, and you're hitting the ROAS or CPA or volume you need, then you also don't need micro-conversions.
Micro-conversions are the solution to low-conversion volume campaigns that are not performing well.
Today's Insider Challenge is this. Think about your Google Ads account or a business you're currently running Google Ads for. What are two things that you could potentially use as a micro-conversion to help a campaign perform better?
You can participate by sending me your response to this challenge or any episode's challenge. The beauty of the Insider Challenge is there's no right or wrong answer, just an opportunity to stretch your brain on real-life Google Ads problem solving. Shoot me an email at thegooglepro@jyll.ca, that's J-Y-L-L.ca, or send me a voice note in my Instagram DMs. I'm @the_google_pro on Instagram.
Last episode's challenge was this. What would you do, if anything, if 80% of your Search campaign spend was coming from hidden “other search terms” and 50% of your conversions were also hidden?
Funnily enough, since I recorded that episode last week, I had a fascinating coaching call with one of my clients. They work at an agency specializing in lead generation for home services businesses. And kind of across the board, a lot of their accounts started performing poorly in the last month or so.
This story is directly tied to my answer to this challenge, so stick with me.
What was interesting when we dug into it is there were a few other things going on, but one was that when performance was good, at least half of their ad spend and conversions were coming from “other search terms,” not visible across accounts. In different industries, different geographies, we saw the same trend. And then more recently, when spend had gone up and conversion volume plummeted, very little of their ad spend and basically no conversions were coming through “other search terms.” It was all visible to us in the Search Terms Report.
Our hypothesis on what happened, because of course, we can't really know for sure, is that there were a lot of long-tail search terms driving good results. And when they last optimized the campaigns, they adjusted keyword match types, they added negatives, they paused some keywords without realizing that these optimizations (in the name of improving efficiency) would actually cut off all this hidden stuff that was working.
Now, this wasn't the only thing happening. There were some other factors that we think were also contributing to this drop. But our solution to this piece of it, and as of when I'm recording, I don't know yet if it's working, but our solution was to actually loosen things up again.
Kind of counterintuitive, right? Because performance is bad right now. But we're moving from Exact back to Phrase. We're launching dynamic ad groups, which is the first time this client is testing those. We're casting that wider net to hopefully recapture those users who were both cheaper to reach and more likely to convert than the super dialed-in Exact Match-only searchers we're getting now.
So to directly answer my challenge, if 80% of my spend was coming from “other search terms” and 50% of my conversions - if it were performing well overall, like the campaign overall was meeting my goals, I would let it keep on keeping on. I would do nothing.
That's the direction Google Ads is going in. Less transparency. So let's ride the wave.
If it were not performing well, because that would mean that the other 20% of my spend, which I can see, is driving half of my conversions, too, then I would use my bid strategy as the guiding mechanism. I would set a target CPA or ROAS, if I were currently on a Maximize strategy. If we already had a target, I would try increasing the ROAS or lowering the CPA. That would be my most direct way to address a performance issue.
What about you? Would you use the bid strategy as a lever or start with something different?
Shoot me an email at thegooglepro@jyll.ca, that's J-Y-L-L dot C-A, or send me a voice note in my Instagram DMs. I'm @the_google_pro on Instagram.
We have a Special Edition Episode for Halloween next week, Episode 40, so the Insider Challenge will return in Episode 41.
I'm Jyll Saskin Gales and I'll see you next time Inside Google Ads.