Measuring Conversion

and knowing if it's good or bad

[stevenmusumeche]

How do you guys measure conversion rates? I do it like this:

# of Orders / Unique Visitors

So if I got 200 visitors and 4 orders, my conversion rate is 2%. This doesn't take into account the order amount, and that bothers me. What other ways of measuring conversion do you use? What is considered a "good" number? My site's main purpose is to sell widgets - it is purely ecommerce.

[bcc1234]

If you are comparing different sales copy or different sources of traffic - you can check earnings per visitor.

Just calculate the profit from all orders divided by the number of visitors.

You can also check the geometric mean of order totals.

If you multiply that mean by the number of orders and divide it by the number of visitors, you will get more precise result with smoothed high(low) ends - this takes care of a few $100 orders when most of your orders are $30.

Added:
Oh yeah, if you are not comparing different copy/traffic sources then your conversion does not mean much. Everybody got different numbers, so there is not "good" number.

I get conversion from 0.2% to 7% depending on the traffic, so a number like that alone is useless.