If your business is generating e-commerce revenue, you’re in good shape. You likely are tracking ecommerce results and setting goals for your website.

For many small and medium-sized businesses, however, selling goods & services online via ecommerce is not yet a strategic component.

Let’s learn about “macro” and “micro” goal conversions and why they are important to your business strategy.

Setting Goals For Your Website

In marketing speak, “macro goals” simply refer to tracking e-commerce revenue generated by your website. A sale is an obvious goal that needs to be tracked when possible. Google Analytics and similar tools can easily provide you with daily, monthly or weekly reports regarding revenue by category or product.

Simply reporting revenue figures doesn’t tell the whole story. Here are a few questions we help answer for our customers when tracking key performance indicators (KPI) for e-commerce sales:

• Which methods for bringing visitors to your website drive the most sales? (Organic Search, Pay Per Click, Social Media, email newsletters, referrals from other websites)
• How do changes in Google AdWords campaigns affect sales? (By Category of product or by specific product)
• How much social media traffic converts to sales? Which social channels are converting? (Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, LinkedIn)

But Most Business Websites Aren’t Driving E-commerce!

If you are not incurring e-commerce revenue from your website, you are not alone. In fact more than 90% of small and medium-sized business websites don’t. The reasons vary, but these are the three most common reasons among our customers:

• Big ticket items are not necessarily conducive to direct online selling (real estate, healthcare services, heating units, construction)
• Lack of integration with business systems to support inventory integration and accounting (local retailers)
• Cost/Benefit Analysis – The costs of implementation outweighs potential revenue

(From Okam’s Razor by Avanish Kashik, World Renowned Marketing Analyst)

Even if your website doesn’t incur ecommerce revenue, there are key actions happening on your website that should be tracked. These are referred to as “micro-conversions.” Let’s learn about how micro-conversions infer value for your website.