Website Conversion Rate
What is Website Conversion Rate?
Broadly defined, the website conversion rate shows the percentage of website visitors that take a desired action on your site. This action converts them from visitors to leads (or customers). The desired action might be downloading an ebook, signing up for a trial, completing a purchase, subscribing to a course, downloading a mobile app, booking a demo, or something else.
How to calculate Website Conversion Rate:
(#) conversions / (#) of website sessions = (%) Website Conversion Rate
Calculating your website conversion rate is straightforward as long as you know what a ‘conversion’ is for your site. Simply divide the number of conversions by the number of website sessions to determine your website conversion rate.
If you have multiple conversion opportunities (e.g. downloading an ebook, signing up for a webinar, and subscribing to an email list), then you can calculate this metric two different ways: 1) separately for each conversion using only the sessions from the specific page(s) the offer is listed, or 2) all the conversions combined using all the sessions for the entire website.
Pros:
This metric is helpful in determining how well optimized your website is and shows potential opportunities for greater sales. A higher conversion rate generally means three things: 1) you’re attracting the right audience for your product/service; 2) your copy and messaging/calls to action/graphics/etc. resonate with your audience; and 3) you’ve made the user’s journey easier, more intuitive, and more compelling. Improving your conversion rate starts by improving the user experience.
A lower conversion rate could be caused by a variety of issues including a slow page load time, a broken form, irrelevant or boring copy, attracting the wrong audience, or not enough perceived value in your offer.
Cons:
If your session numbers are low, then you shouldn’t get too caught up in website conversion rate as it’s not a strong enough sample of data to accurately determine the impact of various changes. Instead, focus on increasing sessions before getting caught up in conversion rates.
Relevant Marketing Metrics and KPIs:
If you’re adding Website Conversion Rate to your marketing dashboard, you might want to also consider tracking these related marketing metrics for context.
Industry Benchmarks
Website conversion rates have quite a bit of variance depending on the industry and business model. Generally though, ecommerce conversion rates are lower coming in between 1.84% and 3.71% - while the average conversion rate across industries ranges between 2.35% and 5.31%.
Mobile apps are in a category all their own with even more divergence between conversion rates depending on the category. On average though, mobile app store pages have an estimated conversion rate of 26.4%.
| Type of Business/Industry | Estimated Average Website Conversion Rate Benchmark |
|---|---|
| Ecommerce | 1.84% - 3.71% |
| B2B | 2.23% - 4.31% |
| Average Across Industries (mobile app excluded) | 2.35% - 5.31% |
| Mobile App Store Page | 26.4% |
Additional Notes:
It’s worth noting that conversion rates will vary massively depending what the conversion is. For example, the conversion rate for downloading a free piece of content is likely to be higher than it will be for a paid purchase. It’s best to track different types of conversions separately using a tool like goals in Google Analytics.
