Conversion Rates

Conversion Rates

What are Conversion Rates?

Conversion rates are the rates at which visitors to your website complete a pre-determined action. For retailers, this action is usually when the visitor makes a purchase. Conversion rate is influenced by many internal and external factors. Testing, personalization, and optimization can help determine which factors are helping your conversion rate and which are hurting it.

Calculating Conversion Rates

To calculate conversion rates, consider the following formula:

Conversions/total number of visitors = conversion rate

 

Tracking Conversions by Industry

Conversions can vary across industries and can be different from business to business.

Below are some examples of conversions your company can track:

website laptop icon

Ecommerce

For eCommerce companies, conversion rates may include the following:

  • Add to Cart rates
  • Purchase Rates
  • Newsletter sign-ups
truck icon

Travel

For organizations focused on business and leisure travel, the following can be tracked:

  • Trips booked
  • Social shares
  • Newsletter sign-ups
website code icon

Software

Product Demonstrations booked

storefront icon

B2B

  • Leads generated
  • Email sign-ups
  • Webinar registrants
Standard conversion rate chart

Conversion Rate Benchmarks

Understanding conversion rate benchmarks can help you understand how you rank among the competition. In the US, conversion rates generally range between 2-3% and in Great Britain conversion rates tend to range between 3-4%.

Although these are the average conversion rates, the top 25% are experiencing conversion rates of about 5.31%. To qualify for the top 10%, landing pages should be seeing conversions of 11.45% or higher.

Personalization

Personalization is correlated with higher revenue due to its ability to connect with pre-existing and new customers. In fact, 77.4% of companies with a personalization program, reported revenue growth in 2018. In contrast, only 45% of companies reported growth, when they didn’t have a personalization program in place. Personalization increases revenue through better customer engagement or conversion rates and many companies are enjoying success through this new trend. For example: BMW personalized MMS messages to its customers which drove a 30% conversion rate and delivered $500,000 in revenue.

Product Recommendations

Product recommendations should be a key part of your personalization strategy if you are an ecommerce business. When product recommendations even inspire minimal customer engagement, they lead to a 70% increase in purchase rates. However, they don’t only deliver on short term revenue, but they also drive more customer loyalty. When these customers who received product recommendations return, they have a 55% higher chance of making a purchase. Additionally, when comparing a session where a consumer abandoned their cart with a recommended product and comparing a session where a consumer abandoned their cart without a recommended product, return sessions for those served product recommendations are 45% more likely to convert.

Optimize Landing Pages for Conversions

Optimizing landing pages to drive conversions can help increase the number of downloads or other predetermined actions. To do this, make it clear what you are offering especially in the headline, so users are sure they are in the right place. Aim for clarity and eliminate jargon from your headline and body copy.

Landing pages should also highlight benefits and selling points for your product. Consider what differentiates you from your competitors and add these into the body. Additionally, if you have testimonials, you can consider adding these to your landing page as social proof.

Also, make it easy for users to convert. A clean design with plenty of white space and a CTA that is easy to find can cater to a successful landing page.

Trust Signals

If you are a newer company or don’t have much brand awareness, it is important to include trust signals on your website or landing pages. Testimonials or certifications can serve as social proof for your products and company. Additionally, offering free trials for your software solution or featuring thought leadership in industry publications can offer credibility for your brand.

A/B Testing

In an A/B test, you create two versions of a webpage or app screen to discover which performs better. By testing different elements of a page or different designs, your team can gain insight into what resonates better with customers and apply those learnings to future campaigns.

When preparing to launch their newest version of SimCity, EA created two landing pages: one with a banner to preorder the game without an offer, and another that had a banner at the top of the page offering customers a promotion for $20 off their next purchase. The second variation of the landing page drives over 40% more purchases. Even though a test may seem like the results would be intuitive, they often aren’t, so be creative with what you and your team test.

Offer Something New

If you’re still not seeing conversions, changing the offer itself can help drive up conversions. Software companies typically offer free demonstrations or free educational content. To tackle this issue more creatively, Wordstream created a landing page encouraging users to grade their AdWords performance. Testing various offers to see how they perform could help drive conversions and leads.

 

Find out more

The Monetate Personalization Engine’s powerful decisioning capabilities can make complex decisions in real-time.

Our machine learning algorithms decide which data is most relevant and which action will have the highest probability of achieving a specific outcome such as increased average order value (AOV) or conversion rates.