Conversion rate or ratio is the percentage of visitors to your website or to a specific landing page who get “converted”, that is, who complete what they are invited to do there.

Depending on the goals of your campaign, type of company or market niche, this conversion may involve:

• Making a purchase
• Providing contact details
• Contacting your company directly
• Subscribing to a newsletter
• Interacting with your chatbot
• Registering with your site
• Downloading something (e-book, video, etc)
• Getting an upgraded service

In short, the conversion rate is the percentage of visitors who complete a measurable action that drives them through the whole conversion process, turning from visitors into leads and from leads into clients.

See more in: What is Lead Nurturing?

Why is the conversion rate important?

Conversion rate allows you to actually know how effective your digital marketing campaigns are being. That’s exactly why it is based on measuring a perfectly objective, measurable action. It’s the first step to understanding how your sales funnel is working and which strategies are throwing the best ROIs.

At the same time, monitoring your conversion rate on a regular basis will help you see clearly if your campaign is doing well or whether you need to enhance your strategy.

How to calculate the conversion rate

As it happens to all proportions and percentages, calculating the conversion rate is pretty simple: you need to know the number of visitors you had within a given period of time, and how many conversions you obtained in that same period.

Once we get that information, we can calculate the percentage with this operation:

Conversion rate = (Conversions / Total Visits) x 100

For instance, if last month your site had 58,008 visitors and 4,250 conversions, the conversion rate was the following:

CR = (4,250 / 58,008 ) x 100

CR = (0.0732) x 100

Conversion Rate = 7.32%

But do not worry –you won’t need to do this calculation every time you want to check your CR, since most online advertising platforms count on tools which display this information automatically.

What type of conversion rates are there?

As it happens with other measuring instruments, conversion rate can be as general or as particular as you want it to be. For instance, you can calculate the CR of all your marketing campaign to know whether your project is going well.

Likewise, you can calculate the CR of individual ads to compare results and dismiss those that are not reporting a good ROI.

Some of the most useful CR types are:

• General: It measures how many conversions all your website generates through all its campaigns.
• Specific channels: It identifies which platform gets more conversions.
• Webpages: It determines which of your landings is best to achieve conversions.
• Individual campaigns: It lets you see which campaigns work best.
• Individual ads: You can find out which ad works best.
• Individual keywords: Knowing which keywords generate more conversions, you can assign them a bigger budget.

You might also be interested in: What is Churn Rate?

Which should be my conversion rate?

An ideal conversion rate changes a lot according to your market niche or even to the time of the year: for instance, a hotel booking site will have many more conversions than a dental care center site.

Some consulting agencies, such as Unbounce, have made a very general analysis that will give you an idea of what to expect. In the last survey, they assessed the performance of over 64,000 landings from different industries, and they found out that the conversion rate of around 90% of the sites is below 12%, and that the pages reporting a good final ROI were at a 5% CR. That means that a good CR can be between 4% and 12%.

If you have already checked the CR of your site and it’s below 4%, it is time to rethink your campaign. However, if it’s above 12%, your criteria for a conversion might not be particularly profitable or your campaign might use methods to force conversion, which will be useless in the long run.

These are really general criteria, and how good or bad your CR will be influenced by elements such as your market niche, your target audience, etc. The best you can do is to measure that result along with the ROI and compare them both.

This article may be helpful: What is Buyer persona?

Learn more about the conversion rate

The conversion rate is a very useful measuring tool and it is a good idea to be informed in order to make the most of it. For that reason, we’ve selected these resources which will help you learn more about the topic:

• What is a good conversion rate? – De Unbounce
• What is Conversion Rate? How to Calculate and Improve Your Conversion Rate – By Disruptive Advertising
• 39 Quick Ways to Increase Your Website’s Conversion Rate – By Entrepreneur
• 4 reasons why traffic is increasing but not conversions – By SEMrush
• The Beginner’s Guide to Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) By HubSpot
• Conversion Rate Optimization [2020 CRO] – By Moz
• Product Content is king for your conversion rates – By SEMrush

Do you need help with your site metrics?

The conversion rate is only one of the many figures, percentages and data provided by Google Analytics and sometimes it is difficult to know what to do with so much information. At Workana you’ll find freelancers specialized in marketing who will help you identify what those figure mean and what you’re supposed to do with them.

Learn more tips in: What’s your best choice? An outsourced agency, a fixed team of employees or a freelancer? Find out the pros and cons of each option.

What is Workana?

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