Conversion Rate CR

Conversion rate is the share of visitors who do the thing you wanted. So you decide what that thing is before you measure anything. For a clinic it is a booked appointment, and for a builder a filled form or a phone call. For a shop it is a paid order, and nothing less counts. That is why a visit on its own is never a conversion, however long the person stayed.

The sum is simple, because you take the number who did it and divide by the number who visited. Multiply by a hundred and you have the rate, so forty enquiries from two thousand visitors is two per cent. Work it out for each page and each advert, never as one figure for the whole site. Otherwise a selling page and a broken page average into a number that tells you nothing.

Honest figures surprise people, because a shop that sells to one visitor in fifty is doing normal work. Two or three per cent is common, and above four is good. A service business asking only for an enquiry sits higher, at five to ten per cent, because filling a form costs the visitor nothing. So anyone promising thirty per cent is counting something else, often people who already knew the name. Ask which, before you sign.

Small numbers move up and down for no real reason. With eighty visits a month, two enquiries reads as 2.5 per cent and three as 3.75 per cent. That jump is chance rather than improvement, yet owners rebuild good pages because of it. Wait for a few hundred visits and a couple of dozen conversions on that page before you change anything. Linkysoft asks how much traffic a page gets before testing a new version, because below that line a test cannot answer the question.

When the rate is low, the page is often not the problem. Check whether the advert promised something the page does not sell, and whether the phone number can be tapped. See that the form works on a real phone, and how long the page takes to open. Those are plain website fixes, and they beat a redesign nearly every time. If the page is fine and the visitors are still wrong, the money is going to the wrong audience. That is work for the marketing side, and Linkysoft measures the two separately for that reason.