Forum Moderators: buckworks
I wanted some feedback on what conversion percentages we should be striving for in our online operations.
We're currently in the following range:
Unique visitors to shopping baskets 3%
Shopping baskets to orders 60%
Would anybody like to share their info, or comment on whether the above is good or bad.
Whether or not they’re good numbers for you is going to depend on a few things, such as how much you’re spending to bring customers to your site, how much the average customer spends on your site, and other pesky figures like how much it costs to run your business.
Gross example
Let’s say it costs you $.50 an ad click for each customer you bring to your site.
That means for every 100 customers you bring to your site you’ll spend $50.
With a 3% conversion rate to cart and 60% cart-to-purchase, that means 2 of every 100 visitors make a purchase, so you’ve spent about $25 to acquire each paying customer.
If each customer buys a $10 widget, that means you’ve lost $15 per customer. Then I’d say a 3% conversion to cart and 60% cart-to-purchase conversion are not good numbers.
If, however, each customer buys a $150 widget, that means you’ve made $125 per customer, which means a 3% conversion to cart and a 60% cart-to-purchase are better numbers!
So you really need to figure out your baseline metrics before you can determine whether your conversion rates are good or not. Then you can worry about tweaking conversion.
If I have any math errors here, will someone please point them out?
I totaly agree with Hawkgirl. Conversion rates can depend on many things - the type of traffic etc.
Assumming that your traffic is coming from mainly free sources however (and in my opinion only) I would say that your figures certainly show that your not doing anything majorly wrong! In fact I'd say that they were pretty good :) - I'd be happy with them (though always work to improve it). Bear in mind though it does depend a lot on the kind of traffic you get.
So, my hunch is that its good - but (as always) you want to strive to improve them! Do you also take bookings via phone (which would make them even better!)
As none of the experts have said it yet I'm going to....
Welcome to Webmasterworld!
TravelSite: your correct in the free traffic, we live and breath by the traffic that google sends us. Which is up over the last couple of weeks.
Hawkgirl had a great point about conversion rates being higher with PPC, we'll have to pay attention to that to monitor for a spike during promotional campaigns.
1. Google main search results - 1 in 200
2. Yahoo directory - 1 in 100
3. PPC - 1 in 20 to 1 in 50
4. Highly targeted text ads on content sites - 1 in 10 to 1 in 20
I do not have any figures on banner advertising yet but these would be extremely important.
Therefore, although free traffic is important, you really need to pay for advertising in order to expand. We are ranked very well for major keywords in Google and thought that our sales and traffic could not increase. However, with a $2500 campaign this month, our sales have tripled and we are now planning a much larger campaign.
I think there are dangers in having conversion rates as a metric of sucess, in ecom supported by free traffic the only things that matter are sales and profits.
Our conversion rate is very high but all our traffic is very targetted, in many ways we would benift from reducing our conversion rate by widening the range of keywords and traffic sources we draw from.
This topic often arises. A "normal" conversion rate for most types of products ranges from 1.5% to 3% based on posts I've seen over the years.
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Keeps you on your toes thinking about the roughly 98% of visitors who don't buy!
