How to easily find your 3 most important conversion rates

Conversion rates are one of the most important key performance indicators (KPI) in digital marketing.

You may be spending money getting traffic, but is it converting to leads? To sales? Which activity is driving that and which isn’t? You may be creating tons of content, but is it getting traffic and engagement? Which posts are converting better leads?  How much traffic do you need to reach specific sales goals?

Knowing these numbers will help you better determine whether you should focus on increasing traffic, optimizing your conversions, or both! 

What does Conversion Rate mean?

Conversion rate is the percentage of users who take a desired action. 

The three primary conversion rates most people track are:

• Traffic to lead:
  How many of your website visits are becoming new leads?
  
• Lead to sale:
  How many of your leads are making a purchase?
  
• Traffic to sale:
  Is the traffic you’re generating converting into customers? 

How do you calculate conversion rates?

• Traffic to lead: 
  Traffic divided by new leads = leads conversion rate
  
• Lead to sale:
  No. of leads divided by no. of sales generated by leads = leads conversion rate
  
• Traffic to sale:
  Traffic divided by no. of sales generated

Where do you find the raw data for these calculations?

Traffic:

Google Analytics

Leads:

This is how many people opted in for something, subscribed for something, registered for something (usually for free, within a specific date range). This data is usually found in your marketing automation tool or in your website (look at entries from a form submitted on your site).

You may want to look at your overall traffic to lead conversion rate, plus the specific conversion rates for individual lead magnets (opt-ins) so you can see which ones are doing well and which are not.

We use ActiveCampaign for marketing automation and Convertbox for many of our opt-ins.

Sales:

Here, we are not looking for total sales, rather, lead to sale. Usually this is found via your marketing automation tool.

How many new leads did you get in a specific date range, and how many of them purchased.

We use ActiveCampaign and put new leads into a “prospects” list and tag them for whatever it is they opted-in for. When they later make a purchase, they are added to a list for “customers.” By performing a simple search of contacts created in a specific date range that are on both lists, we can find this number. I’m sure there are a number of ways to track this; this is one simple example.

What is a good conversion rate?

Conversion rates vary widely depending on your industry, business, quality of content, design, and many other factors. 

Unbounce’s Conversion benchmark report is a great resourse for average conversion rates by industry and other useful data.

What is most important is simply to calculate and monitor your conversion rates and optimize them over time. 

Download our free Marketing Metrics Worksheets and Calculator for help with all of this this.

Want to dig a little deeper?