Macro Conversion

A macro conversion is the final, primary outcome the business exists for: a purchase in a store, a paid signup in a service, a lead submission on a services site.

A macro conversion and a micro conversion are a conceptual pair and mean nothing without each other. The macro is the destination and the micros are the waypoints that raise the odds of reaching it. The importance of this split is practical: a macro conversion is usually low-frequency, so tracking only it leaves too little data for fast optimization; micro conversions are more frequent and signal sooner. The common trap is optimizing a micro conversion at the expense of the macro: you can raise add-to-cart without producing a single extra purchase, so the final judging metric must always stay the macro conversion. A product usually has one macro conversion and several micro ones; if you declare more than one outcome as macro, priority is lost and the team does not know which to sacrifice at a fork.