What’s a good conversion rate?

A conversion rate is represented as a percentage figure, and essentially tells you which proportion of your site’s visitors buy something, fill in a contact form or sign up to a newsletter (to name a few examples). Essentially, a conversion can be any action that you’d like customers to take on your website. But how do you know whether your conversion rate is good?

To calculate your conversion rate, simply take the number of sales you’ve made over a given period (this could be a week, a month or a year) and divide it by the number of unique visitors your site received. Multiply that number by 100, and you’ll have your figure.

For example, if your site welcomed 500 visitors one month, and you sold 25 products, you’d have a conversion rate of 5%.

You can measure a number of different conversions – it doesn’t have to be all about product sales. If your site promotes services instead, you could use contact form entries as an alternative metric.

Why does this matter?

Simply put, your conversion rate tells you how successful your website is at promoting your products or services. The higher your site’s conversion rate, the better it is at convincing potential customers to part with their cash or commit to a specific action – making it a crucial metric if you want your business to succeed online.

Whatever you sell – be it products or services – tracking your website’s conversion rate is a surefire way to determine its effectiveness.

So, what should I aim for?

There’s no universally applicable definition for a ‘good’ conversion rate: it depends very much on the industry in which you’re operating and the kind of business you run.

Conversion rates will also vary significantly from page to page; specific, targeted landing pages can often achieve significantly higher rates than generalised pages, for example, because their content is usually better tailored to what the target audience is searching for.

Average conversion rates fluctuate enormously from sector to sector, but anything between 3 and 5% is generally considered reasonable. The most successful sites can deliver conversion rates of above 5% and, in some cases (though this is sector-dependent), over 11%.

While it’s always worth aiming high, any improvement on your current conversion rate will have been worth the effort.