One of the questions I often get asked from clients running online stores or membership websites is; what is a realistic conversion rate?
Why is the conversion rate important? : The conversion rate is a measure of your websites ability to persuade site visitors to take a particular action you would like them to take. It is therefore a measure of your websites effectiveness.
How to calculate the conversion rate: the conversion rate is the number of visitors who took the particular action you wanted on your site ( i.e. purchased an item or subscribed to a mail list) divided by the total number of visitors to the site over the same period. I generally use a 1 month period as this gives more even results.
Getting statistics about other sites copnversion rates is no mean feat – people generally don’t like to give these figures out – but I have some figures provided by clickz from Fireclick’s actual web retail customers from Dec 2003 - March 2004 ( I little old but should still be relevant)
| Vertical Market | Conversion Rate (%) |
|---|---|
| Catalog | 6.1 |
| Specialty stores | 3.9 |
| Fashion/apparel | 2.2 |
| Travel | 2.1 |
| Home and furnishing | 2.0 |
| Sport/outdoors | 1.4 |
| Electronics | 1.1 |
| All verticals | 2.3 |
| Source: Fireclick Index | |
These figures should at least give you some comparison for your own site…
