Conversion rate... this may sound like a religious metric, but in reality it's one of the best ways to measure the performance of your advertising campaigns.
Unlike the click-through rate or the cost per click, the Conversion ratehow well your marketing gets people to do what you want them to do (in the marketing world, we call this "converting"). Generally, the higher your Conversion ratethe better your marketing!
In this article, we'll go over what your Conversion Rate is how you calculate it and, most importantly, how you can improve it.
What is the conversion rate?
Simply put your Conversion Rate The percentage of visitors to your website or landing page who convert (i.e., do what you want them to do). Depending on your business goals, a "conversion" can be almost anything, but here are a few common types of conversions:
- Make a purchase
- Submitting a form (contact form, lead gen form, etc.)
- A call to your company
- Participation in your online chat
- Registration for a (paid or free) subscription (e.g. a newsletter)
- Register on the website
- Download something (software trial, eBook, mobile app, etc.)
- Use something (new/enhanced feature of your software or app, just using your software/app for a period of time).
- Upgrades for their service
- Engage with your site in some way (time on site, repeat visits, number of pages visited)
- There are many other actions people can take on a website, but that should give you a sense of what a "conversion" is. Basically, a conversion is a measurable action that moves a potential customer along the path to becoming a paying customer in some important way.
How do I calculate the conversion rate?
Conversion calculation is actually quite simple. You just have to divide the number of conversions you get in a certain period of time by the total number of visitors to your website or Landing Page and multiply by 100%.
Conversion rate = (conversions / total visitors) * 100%
For example, if your website had 17,492 visitors and 2,305 conversions last month, your Conversion rate 13,18%. Simple enough, right? If you set up your tracking correctly, most online advertising (eg. Google Ads, Facebook Ads) and analytics platforms (e.g. Google Analytics) your Conversion rate even display them directly in their interface.
Conversion rate vs. click conversion rate?
Now you may be thinking, "But what if the same person converts multiple times? How does that affect my Conversion rate off? Should I count this as one conversion or multiple conversions?"
These are all important questions. To get a handle on the "total conversions vs. converting visitors" problem, marketers use various terms to describe the situation at hand.
As already mentioned, the Conversion rate The number of conversions divided by the number of visitors. To see what percentage of visitors converted (regardless of how many times they converted), you divide the converting visitors by the total number of visitors and multiply by 100%. We usually call this your "click-through rate".
Click conversion rate = (converting visitors / total visitors) * 100%
For many companies, the Conversion Rate practically identical with the click-Conversion Rate, so in this article we will focus on the Conversion Rate. However, click conversion rate can be useful if you have a lot of repeat conversions and want to know what percentage of your visitors are actually converting.
Obtain meaningful data
One thing to keep in mind when calculating your conversion rate is the quality of your data. For example, I've seen campaigns and pages with a conversion rate of 100 %... that seems great until you realize they only had one visitor.
If the sample of your visitors is not very large, it's hard to trust your results. If 5% of 20 visitors convert on your site and one of them converts by accident (it happens), is your site performing very well? Probably not, because your only conversion was an accident.
On the other hand, if 5 % out of 10,000 people convert and 5 of them convert randomly, your conversion rate drops from 5 % to 4.95 %. That's still pretty reliable data.
As each Traffic-source has some degree of natural randomness (random conversions, people who actually wanted to convert but didn't, random periods of high or low conversion rates. Is the only effective way to look at your conversion rates a long enough time frame.
Of course, as with most other conversion rates, there is no "right" time frame for every business. Many marketers like to use a month as a time frame, but if you're a big site like Wal-Mart, you may only need a day to get meaningful data. If you only have a few hundred visitors a month, it may take 6 months to get a feel for your Conversion Rate get.
What is a good conversion rate?
As you can probably imagine, conversion rate varies significantly depending on the quality of traffic, the industry, the business, what you're selling, and even the specific conversion campaign you're pursuing. Therefore, while you can find general conversion rate statistics, what is a good conversion rate for you ultimately depends on your business and your marketing campaign.
It's also important to know that a conversion is not always synonymous with a purchase. While the conversion rate is a useful metric, the goal of most marketing efforts is not to drive conversions, but to generate sales.
For example, imagine you're a partner in a law firm that takes in an average of $3,500 per paying new client and has a profit margin of 50 %. You run 5 marketing campaigns where one conversion is someone filling out a lead form on your landing page.
Test your traffic
Besides testing your website, there is another great way to get your Conversion Rate to improve: Test your Traffic. If the majority of your traffic comes from the organic search results on Google, that's obviously not an option, but if you're running a pay-per-click campaign, you have a big impact on who visits your website or Landing Page visited and why.
This is important because the wrong Traffic will not convert - even on the perfect page.
So how can you make sure you're using the right Traffic on your Landing Page send? Here are 4 things you should keep in mind.
Conclusion
The Conversion Rate is one of the most important marketing metrics. Unlike the click rate, the Conversion Rate from what percentage of your visitors actually do what you want them to do. You can buy as many clicks as you want, but if those clicks don't convert, something is wrong.
Now that you know what the Conversion Rate is how to use them and how you can Conversion Rate can improve, it is time to Conversion Rate-data for you!
By the way, if you need help setting up conversion tracking or optimizing your conversion rates, let us know here or in the comments. We'll be happy to help.
What do you think about Conversion Rate? Do you think it is a useful metric? Would you add any other tips to this article? Leave a comment and let me know!
« Back to Glossary Index