What is a Good Conversion Rate?

Your website is getting noticed and traffic is increasing. It’s nice knowing that potential customers are finding you and showing interest in your products and services, but that on its own doesn’t mean a whole lot unless your visitors are converting.

So, what is a good conversion rate and how do you improve it in order to grow your business? That is what we will be examining.

What is the Conversion Rate, Anyway?

Before we do anything else, we first need to understand what the conversion rate is. Basically, it is a means by which you can gauge the effectiveness of your messaging and product. It represents the percentage of your site’s visitors who act upon the offers you present to them, whatever those offers may be.

For example, you may track the conversion rate of your lead magnet. This will allow you to discover the percentage of those who saw it versus those who offer their email address in exchange for your lead magnet.

Another example might be focused on your sales. If you send your email subscribers a special offer on a particular product, you are able to calculate the conversion rate by looking at the number of subscribers who take advantage of the offer.

You might decide to track conversions for any number of things, including:

• Email click-throughs
• Landing page sign-ups
• Other special offers

The higher your conversion rate, the better, and it can be influenced by many different factors, such as the images on your landing page, your headline, or your call to action.

Calculating Your Conversion Rate

Math may not be your thing, but you needn’t worry. You can obtain your conversion rate quickly and easily by using a tracking program like Google Analytics. Just sign in and look for the data, which is provided for you.

You will need to add a bit of code to your website upon setting up your Google Analytics tracking report, but once done, that will enable you to track whatever you like, whether email sign-ups, Facebook Ads, or anything else you like.

If, for some reason, you need to calculate your conversion rate manually, you can do so provided you know the number of people who visited a particular page and how many converted to your offer. Simply divide the number of conversions by the visitor count and multiply the result by 100.

What is a Good Conversion Rate

According to his article in Instapage, Brandon Weaver concludes that “a good conversion rate is one that’s higher than it is now.”

That makes a good point, but if you are looking for a specific number, that quote may not seem helpful. There is a reason for Weaver’s point of view, however. Imagine that you decide you need a conversion rate of 10 percent. If you are currently at 2 percent, this will seem like an almost impossible goal, particularly if you are expecting to reach it in a very short period of time.

This is why Weaver suggests caution when looking at industry benchmarks. Although they may provide some guidelines for your sector, they can also result in unreasonable expectations or even a sense of panic that you are not meeting them.

To give yourself a more reasonable view of what to expect, you will want a baseline. Determine your current conversion rate and decide where you want it to be in the next 30 days, six months, and one year.

Industry benchmarks aren’t always the most accurate guide for comparison, but they can be useful to get some basic ideas, so let’s look at a few.

Good Conversion Rates for E-commerce

A huge part of online business involves e-commerce, whether we are discussing small shops selling a handful of products, or massive companies like Amazon. There is a huge variety online, but what is the conversion rate?

According to a study conducted in 2017, the average conversion rate for e-commerce is 1.6%, which means that out of every 1,000 people visiting a product page, only 16 are going to convert.

When looking at a number like this, one might be discouraged, but it’s important to remember that there are many factors to be considered, all of which can impact the conversion rate:

• How do the company’s prices compare to competitors?
• How many products do they sell?
• What kind of marketing copy do they have?
• Are they using images and video to sell their products?
• What are the channels that bring the most traffic to their store?

These are just a few of the factors to consider. With so many variables to look at, it’s important to consider your own specific conversion rates in order to determine just how well you are doing.

Other Good Conversion Rates

Often, you will be interested in the conversion rate of your landing pages. But getting a baseline for landing pages is even trickier than for e-commerce.

A study conducted in 2017 involved 74,551,421 visitors to 64,284 landing pages, and the conversion rates varied tremendously. The variance was quite pronounced across industry lines, with the travel and consulting sectors leading the way.

The highest conversion rates approached 30 percent, while the median rates were closer to 4 percent. From this, we can see how necessary it is to optimize your landing pages. While optimizing won’t cause every visitor to convert, it is definitely a numbers game, and optimization can bring more visitors to your page. This, in turn, increases your chance of converting people to your offers.

You may also be tempted to try something like Facebook Ads. You may have heard that they convert very well, and this is accurate. A Wordstream study found that Facebook ads average a conversion rate of 9.21 percent across all industries.

This is quite impressive, but it does require spending money, and as always, there is a bigger picture to consider, namely the return-on-investment. It is best to start small, and once you have determined that your efforts are resulting in profits, you can increase your spending. This can take some time and testing to find the right balance for your company.

How Do You Get a Higher Conversion Rate?

Let’s look at some ways to increase your conversion rate:

• Audit your Landing and Sales Pages

Rather than scrapping a landing page that doesn’t seem to be working, try to determine what isn’t working. Using behavior reports will help you to analyze your pages by showing where people click most often, where they stop scrolling, and much more.

You can use a heat-map to determine where you should place your offers and your links to internal pages.

• Make Your Offer More Clear

If visitors don’t understand your offer, that is almost guaranteed to lower your conversion rate. In most cases, confused visitors will simply click away. Ensure that there is nothing ambiguous about your offer. Be direct and to the point, and make use of compelling verbs and adjectives that can increase engagement.

• Make Sure There Are No Distractions

Just as you don’t want to confuse your visitors, you also don’t want them being distracted away from what you want them to focus on. Try to eliminate visual distractions so that you can guide their eyes where you want them.

Try removing them one at a time and testing the results. Some elements that you might think of as distracting may actually be helpful to conversion, such as video content explaining a complicated product.

• A/B Test Your Main Elements

It’s a good idea to run A/B tests on the main elements of your landing page, such as the headline, product image, call-to-action, and more. Testing and changing these elements individually can give you some insight into the best way to reach your audience.

• Take Inspiration from Other Marketers

While you definitely don’t want to steal from anyone, you can take inspiration from them. Check them out on social media, visit their landing pages, and generally check out what they are doing that you think could work well in your business, then adapt it to your own style.

• Try Different Incentives

No matter how good your incentives are, they won’t appeal to everyone. Even free downloads, discounts, and other incentives will not be wanted by every visitor.

By testing different incentives, you may find that one results in 3 percent conversion while another provides 5 percent. In such a case, you clearly benefit more from the latter. Keep in mind, however, that this may vary based on the referral source as well. It may be worthwhile to have different landing pages with offers that appeal to different referral sources.

Closing Thoughts

To reiterate what Brandon Weaver said, a good conversion rate is anything that is better than the rate at which you are currently converting.

If you work on improving your conversion rate, your business will see more leads and sales. This will take some time and effort—as well as some testing—but will be more than worthwhile for your business.