Why do we obsess over conversion rates? Well, the main reason is that they offer an easy way to see how well our efforts are paying off. If you are selling online and putting time, money and other resources into sending potential customers to your website, you’d be foolish to ignore things like conversion rates. However, it’s important to remember that conversion rates don’t tell the full story.
So, what is a good e-commerce conversion rate?
The short answer is between 1-3%.
It’s that simple. If your website is achieving a conversion rate between 1-3%, then you are up there with the best of them.
If you want to get even more precise, you can also drive down into more industry-specific conversion rates. If your website conversion rate is below 1%, then it could be because you’re operating in an industry with lower than average conversion rates.
Image from Growcode
For example, did you know that the arts and crafts industry enjoys one of the highest conversion rates? Or that Electric equipment has a higher average conversion rate than kitchen and home appliances?
How are e-commerce conversion rates calculated?
The standard method of calculating conversion rates in Google Analytics is the number of sales as a percentage of the total number of sessions. Another way of looking at conversion rates is by looking at the percentage of unique users that make a purchase. Looking at sessions
Why track e-commerce conversion rates?
If you are selling online, it’s important to keep track of how successful your website is in generating sales. If you are spending money on pay per click advertising on search engines or social media, it’s important to know if they highly-targeted traffic you are sending to your website is actually converting. If not, then you might need to rethink the targeting strategy.
Common issues with conversion rates
Conversion rates shouldn’t be monitored in isolation as there are many other factors that make up the picture of overall website health. Focussing solely on the conversion rate fails to take into consideration some of the subtle nuances of website traffic data.
For example, if your website is content-rich and users typically trigger multiple sessions while reading your content, your conversion rate might look low in comparison. However, if that content is helping to boost sales and encourage repeat custom, then it is surely worth the drop in conversion rates.
Conversion rates are also drastically different on mobile devices. Did you know that it’s normal for conversion rates on mobile to be half of what they are on desktop? It’s also normal for your conversion rates to skyrocket during shopping events such as Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
When it comes to analytics, there is no one metric which can give you the full picture. We’ve written about the importance of CPA (cost per acquisition) and how this can often be more useful than ROI, but again, this doesn’t give a complete picture. Instead, it’s important to look at all of the information available in order to determine the success of an e-commerce website.