What is a macro conversion?

How do you choose the macro conversion?

Three tests, and a candidate must pass all of them.

It represents real business value. Someone downstream can trace revenue to it. A form submission that no salesperson follows up is not a macro conversion.

It is countable. A discrete event that fires on the outcome and only on the outcome. Goal completion covers what makes that reliable in practice.

It is the thing you would optimize if you could only optimize one. If two candidates compete, one is the macro conversion and the other is a micro conversion or a guardrail.

For B2B SaaS the common mistake is picking the form that is easiest to instrument over the one that produces pipeline. Ease of counting is not evidence of value.

How many should a site have?

One per audience, and most sites have fewer audiences than they think.

A site serving buyers and existing customers has two macro conversions: the demo request and the support resolution. A site serving one audience through three funnels still has one macro conversion, since the funnels differ and the outcome does not.

The failure mode is declaring five, which means no prioritization is possible. When every test can be justified by some conversion metric, the metric has stopped constraining anything, and the whole value of naming a macro conversion is the tradeoffs it forces.

Why is the macro conversion often the wrong thing to measure?

Because it is too rare to test on at most B2B volumes, and because it stands in for revenue without measuring it. The right business goal and a usable test metric are rarely the same number.

The volume problem has two answers. Run tests on validated micro conversions while the macro conversion sits on the same test as a guardrail. Then read the macro conversion itself over a longer horizon with a holdout group, which measures the cumulative effect of a quarter of testing rather than the effect of any one test.

The revenue problem has no shortcut. A demo request is not a customer. Where the CRM allows the join, connecting conversions to closed-won data sometimes shows that the variant producing more requests produced fewer customers, which no on-site metric could have revealed on its own.

Related terms

Micro conversion · Conversion funnel · Guardrail metrics · Goal completion · Revenue per visitor

Service: Conversion Rate Optimization.

FAQ

Can a site have more than one macro conversion?

Yes, when it genuinely serves distinct audiences with distinct outcomes. Most sites that claim several are avoiding a prioritization decision rather than describing their business.

Is a newsletter signup a macro conversion?

For a media business whose revenue depends on audience, yes. For a B2B SaaS company selling a product, no. It is a micro conversion, and often a weakly predictive one.

What is the difference between a macro conversion and a goal?

A goal is any tracked completion configured in analytics. The macro conversion is the one goal that represents the primary business outcome. Every macro conversion is a goal, and most goals are not macro conversions.