Conversion rate

Defining the conversion

Conversion rate = conversions ÷ visitors × 100. The hard part is being clear about both numbers. A conversion can be a sign-up, a trial, a first payment or a booked demo. Visitors can mean unique visitors or sessions, and one visitor can have several sessions. State which you use and keep it the same, or the rate will change when nothing else has.

Measure each step of your funnel separately: visit to sign-up, sign-up to activation, activation to payment. A single visitor-to-paid rate hides where people drop out.

Why rates differ by source

Visitors from different places arrive with different intent. People who search for exactly the problem you solve convert far better than people who clicked out of curiosity on a launch platform. That is normal. Compare each traffic source with itself over time rather than with an average, and tag links with UTM parameters so you can tell the sources apart.

Small numbers mislead. With 200 visitors, 4 sign-ups or 8 sign-ups is the difference between 2 and 4 percent, and that can be chance. Wait for a few hundred visitors per version before you decide a change worked.

Raising it

Make the page say what the product does and who it is for in the first screen. Remove form fields you do not need. Make the page load fast, especially on phones. Show proof such as real customer quotes, numbers or a short demo. And send people from each channel to the page that matches why they came.

Example

A launch week brings 2,400 visitors. 180 sign up, so the visit-to-sign-up rate is 180 ÷ 2,400 = 7.5 percent. Of those 180, 18 become paying customers, a sign-up-to-paid rate of 10 percent and a visitor-to-paid rate of 0.75 percent. Visitors from a search guide converted at 12 percent, visitors from a launch board at 5 percent.

Questions people ask

What is a good conversion rate?

There is no single good number. It depends on the goal, the price and where the traffic comes from. A free sign-up converts far better than a paid plan. Track your own rate per source and work to raise it.

Should I measure conversion per visitor or per session?

Per visitor is usually clearer for sign-ups, because people often visit several times before they decide. Pick one and keep it the same in every report.