What is a good conversion rate? (And how to improve it)

Wrapping up a launch that didn’t meet your expectations can be disappointing, but your conversion rate might not be the problem.

How to calculate your conversion rate

You can calculate your conversion rate by taking the number of sales, or conversions, and dividing that by the number of unique visitors to your sales page. You’ll want to use the number of unique visitors, as some people may have visited your sales page a few times before they decided to buy.

So let’s say you’ve made 5 sales, and had 250 unique visitors on your sales page.

5/250 = .02.

Multiply by 100 to turn it into a percentage and you see you have a conversion rate of 2%.

You might also be interested in setting up Google Analytics to track your conversion rate.

Conversion Rate Benchmarks

But how do you know whether that’s a good conversion rate? First, you need to know the benchmarks are different depending on industry, your audience size, whether it’s a cold or warm audience, whether it’s a low-ticket or high-ticket offer, and more.

That said, there are some general benchmarks I can share with you.

The top 25% of all websites – as a whole, so not just the landing or sales pages, but the whole website – convert at around 5.3% across their entire website. (Sources: Impact, Neil Patel, Wordstream)

• For opt-in pages, you should aim for 20%-50% or better.
• For sales pages, aim for at least 1%-2%.

You can also calculate different conversion rates depending on where the traffic is coming from. It will be different for traffic that’s coming from your email list, Facebook ads, or your social media posts – and you could even divide that into traffic that comes from Instagram stories vs. your Instagram bio.

For example, your email list, with warm leads, should get a conversion rate of 3-5% or even higher.

But while benchmarks can help you see your conversion rate might not be so bad after all, you should use your own data as a guide for your next launch. 

How to increase your conversion rate

Once you know your own conversion rate, you can use that as a baseline and start working on increasing it. The easiest way to get started optimizing your conversion rate is by running A/B tests.

A/B tests

With A/B tests, you set up two or more versions of your page and redirect traffic equally between them. You need a good amount of traffic to each version, some sites will even tell you you need 10,000 page views or more, but I’ve found you can start with less and still see good results from small changes you’re testing.

I recommend having at least 500 page views for each version.

If you have less traffic than that per month, you might be better off to work on increasing your traffic first, but you could also have one version up for however long it takes to get those page views, then make a small change and wait until that version has the same amount of pageviews and compare data that way. It’s not quite as reliable, because you might be changing what you’re doing to get traffic during that time and the type of traffic also has an effect on your conversion rate, but when I first did this on my own site I still noticed a good increase in my opt-in conversion rate when I changed just one small thing.

Common mistake to avoid when running an A/B test: don’t make multiple changes at once

Test just one small change at a time, which could be the headline, or the button text, or anything else, but always just one small, specific change.

If you’re making too many changes between the versions you’re testing, you won’t know which change had the biggest impact or they might even cancel each other out. 

It might be that the headline on version 1 is better than on version 2, but the button text on version 2 worked better than on version 1 and you’re seeing an equal conversion rate between the two.

If you’re first testing the headline and then later on testing the button text, you can actually track the exact changes that have the biggest impact for you.