One of the great things about conversion rate is that you can be as specific or as broad with your conversion rate as you want to be. Here are a few different types of conversion rate you can use and ways you can use this data to examine performance:
Overall conversion rate (how well does your website convert traffic from any source?)
Marketing channel conversion rate (is AdWords traffic or Facebook Ads traffic more likely to convert?)
Page-level conversion rate (which of these pages is better at converting traffic?)
Campaign conversion rate (did my targeting changes improve anything?)
Individual ad conversion rate (do I need to change my ad copy? does this ad drive more qualified traffic?)
Keyword conversion rate (which keywords deserve more budget?)
Obviously, this list just scratches the surface. Conversion rate is a great metric for evaluating the performance of almost any aspect of your online marketing. Driving clicks is great, but if those clicks don’t end up doing something that is beneficial for your business, something needs to change.
Conversion Rate vs Click Conversion Rate
Now, you might be thinking, “But what if the same person converts multiple times? How does that affect my conversion rate? Should I count that as one conversion or multiple conversions?”
Those are all great questions. To deal with the whole “total conversions vs converting visitors” problem, marketers use different terms to describe each situation.
As we discussed above, conversion rate is 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 converting visitors by total visitors and multiply by 100%. We typically call this your “click conversion rate”.
Click conversion rate = (converting visitors / total visitors) * 100%
Again, with the right conversion tracking in place, most online advertising and analytics platforms allow you to view your click conversion rate, but here’s another calculator you can use to calculate your click conversion rate:
[calculoid id=”43527″ show_title=”1″ show_description=”0″]
For many businesses, their conversion rate is virtually identical to their click conversion rate, so we’ll focus on conversion rate in this article. However, click conversion rate can be handy in situations where you get a lot of repeat conversions and want to see what percentage of your actual visitors are converting.
Getting Meaningful Data
One thing to keep in mind as you calculate your conversion rate is the quality of your data. For example, I have seen campaigns and pages with a 100% conversion rate…which seems great until you realize that they only had one visitor.
If your traffic sample isn’t very big, it’s hard to trust your results. If 5% of 20 people convert on your site and one of them converted by accident (it happens), is your page working very well? Probably not, since your only conversion was an accident.
On the other hand, if 5% of 10,000 people convert and 5 of them converted by accident, your conversion rate drops from 5% to 4.95%. That’s still fairly dependable data.
Since every traffic source has a certain amount of natural randomness (accidental conversions, people who meant to convert but didn’t, random periods of high or low conversion rates, etc), the only effective way to look at your conversion rates is to use a sufficiently long timeframe.
Of course, like most other conversion rate-related concepts, there is no “right” timeframe for every business. Many marketers like to use a month as their go-to timeframe, but if you’re a big site like Wal-Mart, you might only need a day to get meaningful data. If you only get a few hundred visits a month, it may take 6 months to really get a feel for your conversion rate.
What is a Good Conversion Rate?
As you can probably imagine, conversion rates vary considerably depending on your traffic quality, industry, business, what you’re selling and even the specific conversion action you’re tracking. As a result, while you can find broad conversion rate statistics out there (like this handy study conducted by Unbounce), what qualifies as a good conversion rate for you will ultimately be specific to your business and your marketing campaign.
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