Most people who visit your site won’t buy today. That’s normal. But what they do while they’re there says a lot about whether they’ll buy later.
Someone who reads your pricing page, scrolls the full product page, and adds something to their cart is not the same as someone who bounced after three seconds. Ad platforms treat them the same unless you tell them otherwise.
That’s what signal engineering is: deciding which of those actions matter, putting a dollar value on them, and sending that back to the platforms so they can find more people who act the same way.
Why bother when you already track purchases
Two reasons.
Volume. Ad platforms learn faster with more data. If you only get a handful of purchases a week, the algorithm is basically guessing. Micro-actions give it hundreds of signals instead of a handful.
Speed. For anything with a long buying cycle, like B2B, high-ticket items, or services, the purchase might happen weeks later. Waiting that long to learn whether a campaign works is expensive.
What counts as a micro-action
It depends on the business, but common ones are:
- Viewing the pricing page
- Scrolling past a certain point on a key page
- Watching most of a product video
- Adding to cart, starting checkout
- Using a calculator, size guide, or product quiz
- Clicking to call, or opening the booking widget
- Coming back to the site within a few days
How to weigh them against real revenue
This is the part people skip, and it’s the part that matters. Not every action is worth the same, and guessing the values is how you end up optimizing for the wrong thing.
- Look at people who bought. What did they do before they bought? Which actions show up again and again?
- Look at people who didn’t. Which actions show up for them too? An action everyone does doesn’t tell you much.
- Estimate the value. Roughly: how often does this action lead to a purchase, times what that purchase is usually worth. If 1 in 20 people who view pricing ends up buying, and the average order is $200, a pricing view is worth about $10.
- Send the value with the event. Then the platforms can bid for the higher-value actions instead of treating everything the same.
- Recheck often. Values change when your site, offer, or traffic changes.
Micro-actions only work if they’re tracked cleanly
This is where a lot of setups fall over. A micro-action is only useful if it fires once, at the right moment, with the source still attached. If someone landed from an ad, browsed three pages, and then hit the pricing page, you want that pricing view tied back to the ad that brought them in. That means storing the UTMs and click ID from the landing page, which most sites don’t do. I cover how in Your pixel is probably broken.
A word of caution
Micro-actions are a means to an end. If a campaign drives a ton of pricing page views but those visitors never buy, the values are wrong and need resetting. Always keep the real number as the judge, and ideally that’s profit, not revenue. More on that in Platform ROAS isn’t revenue.
For lead gen, the same logic runs over a longer timeline: the micro-actions get the platform learning early, and the closed deals you send back within the 90-day window tell it which of those early signals actually mattered.
Where Apello fits
Apello creates and quantifies these micro-actions against dollar value, keeps the values honest by checking them against real revenue, and uses that data in your campaigns.