MSM FULL-FUNNEL CONVERSION GLOSSARY
What is Conversion Rate?
Conversion rate is the percentage of people who take the action you wanted, calculated by dividing conversions by total visitors or sessions and multiplying by 100.
THE SHORT ANSWER
The Definition
Conversion rate is the percentage of people who take the action you wanted, calculated by dividing conversions by total visitors or sessions and multiplying by 100.
Why It Matters Commercially
It's the cheapest lever you have. Doubling traffic means doubling spend. Improving conversion rate costs you the work of fixing whatever is stopping people, and every visitor you already pay for becomes worth more. It also compounds, because the same improvement applies to all future traffic.
How It's Measured
Conversion rate = (Conversions ÷ Total sessions or visitors) × 100. Decide first whether you're measuring sessions or unique users, because the two produce different numbers from the same data.
Who Owns It
Marketing owns the website conversion rate. Sales owns the rates further down the funnel. Someone needs to own the connection between them, because a rising website conversion rate paired with a falling close rate usually means the traffic has changed rather than improved.
HOW IT WORKS
Conversion rate is a percentage. Take the number of people who did the thing you wanted, divide by the number who had the chance, multiply by 100.
The complication is that a website has several conversion rates and businesses often quote one while thinking about another.
- Site wide conversion rate. Enquiries divided by all sessions. Useful as a trend, close to useless for diagnosis, because it averages your best and worst pages together.
- Page conversion rate. Enquiries from a specific page divided by visits to it. This is where problems show up.
- Form conversion rate. Submissions divided by people who started the form. Tells you whether the form itself is the obstacle.
- Channel conversion rate. The same calculation split by traffic source. Often the widest variation of the lot.
Sessions or users
This trips people up more than anything else. If one person visits three times and enquires once, that's a 33% conversion rate measured by session and 100% measured by user. Both are correct. They describe different things.
Analytics platforms differ in their defaults, so check which yours uses before comparing your number to anyone else's.
What counts as a good conversion rate
Published benchmarks are worth treating carefully. They average wildly different business models, price points and traffic sources, and they rarely state whether they're measuring sessions or users.
A more useful comparison is your own site over time, and your own pages against each other. If one service page converts at three times the rate of another with similar traffic, that gap tells you more than any industry average.
Conversion rate versus conversion rate optimisation
The rate is the measurement. Conversion rate optimisation is the work of improving it. Plenty of businesses track the number monthly without ever acting on it, which is reporting rather than optimising.
Conversion rate versus close rate
Conversion rate usually refers to the website, turning visits into enquiries. Close rate refers to sales, turning opportunities into customers. Both are conversion rates in the broad sense, and improving one without the other rarely changes revenue much. Doubling enquiries achieves nothing if your close rate halves because the extra enquiries don't qualify.
Our CRO and website performance work looks at both. We've also written about the changes that increase website conversions fastest.
WHAT THIS LOOKS LIKE IN PRACTICE
A business reports a site wide conversion rate of 2%. Reasonable on the surface, so nobody looks further.
Split by page, their main service page converts at 4.5% and their homepage at 0.4%. Split by channel, organic search converts at 3.8% and paid social at 0.2%.
The average told them nothing. The split told them two things: the homepage isn't sending people to the page that works, and the paid social campaign is bringing in people who were never going to enquire.
IS THIS COSTING YOU REVENUE RIGHT NOW?
Check these against your own reporting:
- Do you know your conversion rate by page, or only site wide?
- Do you know it by traffic source?
- Do you know whether your analytics measures sessions or users?
- Are all your conversion points tracked, including phone calls and direct emails?
- Has the figure been checked against your CRM, or does it come from analytics alone?
- Do you know which page has the biggest gap between traffic and conversions?
Two or more no answers and the number you're reporting isn't telling you where the problem is.
SEE WHAT YOUR COMPETITORS ARE DOING THAT YOU AREN'T
We'll analyse two of your competitors against your own site and show you where they're winning conversions you should be getting.
WHAT WE SEE IN THE FIELD
Most businesses we audit quote a single site wide conversion rate, and that number hides everything useful. Split it by page and by channel and the picture usually changes completely. One page carrying the average, one channel dragging it down.
Start there before changing anything. The diagnosis is nearly always more valuable than the first fix you'd have reached for.
Reviewed by Ian Wilson, MSM.
Frequently Asked
KEEP EXPLORING
FIND OUT WHERE YOUR MARKETING AND SALES ARE LOSING CONVERSIONS
Book your 45 minute dicovery call where we will discuss and examine your customer journey from attention and website behaviour through lead quality, handover, CRM, pipeline, follow up and close, then tells you what to fix first.