Improving Online Conversion Rates
Generating More Sales Utilizing Existing Traffic & Visitors

Revised September 26, 2018
Originally Published August 6, 2008

Businesses can improve the return of their online investment, and increase revenues, by improving the website (or online presence) conversion rates of existing traffic.

Improved conversion leads to increased lead generation, and more online sales WITHOUT spending more money for additional traffic or advertising.

What Is A Conversion Rate?

The online Conversion Rate (CR) is the number of sales or leads that are generated from a site's current number of visitors.

Conversion Rates are easy to calculate:

• Find the number of orders "Total Orders" or "Total Leads" generated from the website/profile for a given period (e.g. one month or one year)
  
  
• Using analytics, find the number of unique visitors "Total Unique Visitors" for the same given period (e.g. one month or one year)

To determine the Conversion Rate (CR) take Total Orders (or Leads) and divide by Total Unique Visitors; then multiply the result by 100 to get the conversion percentage, also known as Conversion Rate.

Example Equation

(TOTAL ORDERS / TOTAL UNIQUE VISITORS) * 100 = CONVERSION RATE

For example, say for the month of November a site had 10,000 unique visitors and 250 orders. Using these numbers, one would divide 250 by 10,000 which is 0.025 and multiply that by 100 for a result of 2.5%.

(250 / 10,000) * 100 = 2.5%

This shows that 2.5 unique visitors out of every 100 unique visitors convert to a sale or lead.

More Profit, No Additional Investment

Once a business has figured the Conversion Rate, what does it mean?

As a good rule of thumb, the following are some decent guidelines for evaluating a website or online platform's Conversion Rate, and what it means to the business:

• Over 5% Conversion: The business is in what's called a vertical market where there's probably little to no competition for customers, or customers must purchase from the company with little alternative choices
  
  
• 3-4% Conversion: The website is doing an excellent job with few to no areas for improvement
  
  
• 2-3% Conversion: This is an average rate and means the website is doing a decent job with only a few areas for improvement
  
  
• 1-2% Conversion: The site or profile could use some definite improvement to convert traffic to orders or leads
  
  
• Under 1% Conversion: The website is in need of a good deal of help and should be analyzed from all areas

By improving the online conversion rate, a company can increase profit, and bring in more money!

Increasing Conversion Rate (CR) usually entails optimizing the current website (or online presence) content for a better customer experience.

Areas to Improve

In general, no matter how good the Conversion Rate, there are always areas to improve content and customer experience. There are numerous methods that can be used to improve Conversion Rates.

The following are a few main areas to focus on that generally improve any website's (or any online presence) Conversion Rate (CR):

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