# Website conversions: macro vs micro, with examples by site type

Source: https://analyzine.com/explained/conversion/  
Author: Sadiq Ahmed  
Updated: 2026-11-02

Quick answer

A website conversion is a visit that ends with someone doing something you care about, such as placing an order, booking a class, enrolling on a course or sending an enquiry form. Analytics tools count each one so you can see how many visits turn into real results and which sources bring them.

## What a website conversion means

A website conversion happens when a visitor stops browsing and does the thing your site is there for. They buy the candle. They book the Tuesday yoga class. They enrol on the course or fill in the quote form. The word comes from marketing: a visitor has been "converted" into a customer, a lead or a subscriber.

What counts is up to you. Analytics software doesn't know your business, so a conversion is whatever you tell it to record. That's the useful part, and also where people go wrong, because a vague definition gives you a vague number.

In practice every conversion has three parts:

- **An action**: an order placed, a form submitted, an account created.
- **A moment**: when it happened, and in which visit (or [session](https://analyzine.com/explained/session/)).
- **Context**: where the visitor came from, which campaign brought them, and sometimes how much money it was worth.

The third part is why conversions are worth tracking at all. Knowing you had 40 orders last month is nice. Knowing that 25 came from organic search and only 3 came from the Instagram campaign you paid for is something you can act on.

## Macro and micro conversions

Not every conversion is equal. Most people split them into two groups.

**Macro conversions** are the main outcomes the site exists to produce. For a shop that's an order. For a course seller it's an enrolment. For a physiotherapist it's a booked appointment. If you could only track one number, it would be this one.

**Micro conversions** are smaller steps that tend to come before the big one: adding something to the basket, joining a mailing list, downloading a price list, creating an account, starting checkout.

|  | Macro conversion | Micro conversion |
| --- | --- | --- |
| What it is | The outcome the business needs | A step that often leads there |
| How often it happens | Less often | More often |
| Examples | Order, enrolment, booking, paid signup | Add to basket, newsletter signup, brochure download |
| Best used for | Judging results | Finding where people drop off |

Micro conversions earn their place because they happen more often. A small shop might get a dozen orders a week, which is too few to spot a pattern. It might get a hundred basket additions, and that's enough to see that one product page gets plenty of interest and almost no checkouts.

Don't treat a micro conversion as success on its own, though. A newsletter signup is worth something only if some of those subscribers go on to buy, book or enrol.

## Examples by type of business

The right conversions depend on how the business makes money. A few common WordPress setups:

### Online shop (WooCommerce or SureCart)

- Macro: completed order, ideally with its value.
- Micro: add to basket, checkout started, account created, back-in-stock alert requested.

### Course seller (LearnDash)

- Macro: paid enrolment.
- Micro: free preview lesson started, pricing page viewed, webinar registration.

### Service business taking bookings

- Macro: booking confirmed (a yoga class, a haircut, a consultation).
- Micro: timetable viewed, phone number tapped on mobile, gift voucher page visited.

### Lead generation (consultant, agency, trades)

- Macro: enquiry or quote form sent.
- Micro: case study read, brochure downloaded, callback requested.

### Blog or publisher

- Macro: newsletter signup, paid membership, or an affiliate link click if that's how the site earns.
- Micro: second article read, free download.

## How conversions are counted

Counting sounds simple. There are a few choices hidden inside it.

**Once per visit or every time.** If someone submits your contact form twice in one visit, is that one conversion or two? Some tools count every event; others count at most one per session for a given action. For orders, counting each order makes sense. For an enquiry form, one per visit usually reflects reality better.

**Which visit gets the credit.** Someone finds your shop through Google on Monday, comes back through a newsletter link on Thursday and buys. The order happens in Thursday's visit, but Monday's search started it. This is attribution. Simple setups credit the last visit; others credit the first, or share the credit out. None of them is the one true answer. Pick one, understand what it hides, and keep it consistent.

**Attempted or confirmed.** Do you count a WooCommerce order when the thank-you page loads, or when the order is actually recorded? Page loads can double-count if someone refreshes, and can miss orders when a payment gateway never sends the customer back to your site. Reading the order from the shop's own data is usually more reliable than watching for a page.

**Value.** Some conversions carry a money value (an order total, a course price). Others don't, but you can estimate one. If one in five quote requests becomes a £500 job, a quote request is worth roughly £100 to you. Values let you compare very different actions, and they're how you get to [average order value](https://analyzine.com/explained/average-order-value/).

## Reading conversions in context

A raw count only tells you so much. Two shops with 50 orders a month are in very different places if one had 1,000 visits and the other had 10,000. That's what [conversion rate](https://analyzine.com/explained/conversion-rate/) is for.

The other half is source. Here's a made-up month for a small candle shop:

| Source | Visits | Orders |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Organic search | 1,200 | 18 |
| Email newsletter | 300 | 12 |
| Social media | 900 | 4 |

Social sends three times the visits of the newsletter and a third of the orders. You'd only see that by tying each conversion to its [traffic source](https://analyzine.com/explained/traffic-source/). This is what Analyzine is built around: conversions, revenue and conversion rate inside wp-admin, with each order, enrolment or booking tied to the source, medium and campaign that earned it.

## Mistakes that make conversion data less useful

- **Counting everything.** If ten different actions are all "conversions", the total stops meaning anything. Keep one or two macro conversions and a handful of micro ones. [Goal tracking](https://analyzine.com/explained/goal-tracking/) covers how to choose.
- **Counting clicks instead of completions.** A click on "Submit" isn't a sent form if the form then shows an error.
- **Including test orders.** Your own test purchases and staff orders inflate the numbers. Exclude them or delete them.
- **Changing definitions mid-year.** If you switch from counting forms per visit to counting every submission, this month can't be compared with last month.

## Conversions and privacy

You don't need to know who someone is to count their conversion. "An order worth £34 came from the spring newsletter" is useful information with no name attached. Cookieless analytics can count conversions within a visit and link them to the source of that visit. Linking a purchase to a visit several days earlier is harder without a lasting identifier, and that's an honest trade-off to weigh rather than a reason to collect more than you need.

Before you change any settings, write down your one or two macro conversions and three or four micro ones in plain words. That short list will shape every report you look at afterwards.

## Frequently asked questions

### What does conversion mean in web analytics?

It means a visitor completed an action you've decided to count as a result, such as an order, a booking or a form submission. The analytics tool records when it happened, which visit it belonged to and where that visitor came from.

### What counts as a conversion on a website?

Anything you define as one. Most sites track one main outcome (an order, an enrolment, an enquiry) plus a few smaller steps that lead to it, like adding to the basket or joining a mailing list.

### Is a newsletter signup a conversion?

It can be. For a blog or publisher it's often the main conversion. For a shop it's usually a micro conversion: worth tracking, but less important than an order.

### How are conversions counted if someone buys twice?

Two separate orders are normally counted as two conversions, even in the same visit. Some tools count certain actions, such as form submissions, only once per session, so check how yours does it before comparing figures.

### What is a conversion event?

It's the specific recorded action that marks a conversion, for example "order placed" or "form submitted". The event is the signal; the conversion is what you call it once you've decided that event matters to the business.