What is a Typical Conversion Rate?

What’s a Typical Conversion Rate, is a question we get asked all the time. Unfortunately, I’m unable to answer that question specifically, because there are too many variables as I’ve listed lower in this post.

Although you can get significantly higher, we often suggest that when starting out, and when you are getting “Cold” prospects to your site, expect only 1 in 200 people to become a customer; 0.5%. This might seem low, but in some industries, this is actually good.

For things like PPC (Pay Per Click), anything over 1% is good. But then that is only the conversion of somebody clicking on the ad, not actually buying something.

But don’t forget, you’ve got to think of the value of your site to end users. You might offer free content, advice, tips, give aways (ethical bribes as we like to call them), all of which could mean that prospects and even existing customers come back time and time again, without the need to buy. In this case, you could have considerably more viewers of the site than buyers, which would negatively impact your conversion rates.

Variables that impact conversion are:

• The industry
• The demographic of your target audience
• The ticket price of the product; commodity vs high value
• Brand awareness can make a big difference as searchers look specifically for that company and their product, and therefore they get very high conversions.
• The type of product can make a difference. Are people coming back to a site to buy “Consumables”, which wouldn’t give a true reflection of “Sales” vs “Re-orders”, yet could give high conversions
• Your source of traffic and the quality of the visitor makes a difference.
• Referral systems can make big difference (both JV referral or customer referrals and the incentives you offer)
• To be honest, the list goes on….

This is the number one thing we learnt.

START SOMETHING!

Until you’ve got some data, you can’t plan. You can do all the keyword research in the World, but then you start to see some data and go with the flow.

Once you’ve got data coming in, then it’s about Continuous improvement.

You split test so you can compare, you tweak words, change images, use different landing pages, make different offers, give away different bonuses, etc….

Good Conversion is a living, breathing thing. It’s not something you do once and it’s certainly not “Typical”