Conversion Ratios
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A conversion ratio is the ratio of the number of online orders from your company website in relation to actual website visits. Let's assume that 100 potential buyers visit your company website and only one person places an order, your conversion ratio is 1%. In a recent survey of 100 top ecommerce companies, 22% reported conversion rates between 1% and 1.9%, 20% reported conversion rates between 2% and 2.9%. Of the 100 companies; only 20 have surpassed the 5% conversion ratio.
Website conversion rates on their own are a meaningless metric. A website could have hundreds of thousands of visitors which are looking for something completely different than that which the website provides. In addition, the conversion event itself could vary from submitting an online form, to signing up for car insurance. Benchmarking conversion rates with 'averages' or competitors is a futile exercise given the wide disparity in conversion events and traffic sources.
Like with any website metric, context can make all the difference. For example, it is common practice for website conversion rates to be segmented by channel, e.g. PPC/Affiliate/SEO/etc. With this context, a website conversion rate becomes an effective measure of the relative performance of each trafffic driving channel.
The leading online blog for Website Conversion optimisation is GrokDotcom.