What conversion rate is acceptable?

[potato95]

We currently use adwords to drive traffic to our site that sells personal clothing items. Much of the traffic is reasonable quality as our adwords tend to be pretty tightly defined around our market.

Out of this traffic we tend to get about 5% adding products to the basket and about 25% of these actually converting to a sale. We are constantly trying to reduce our cost/conversion and have made progress in doing so. My question is are the above figures, terrible, average or good? My guess is they are pretty poor but I have nothing to compare or go-on. Is loosing 75% of customers between the cart and the conversion as bad as it seems! Should we be getting more people adding to the cart in the first place?

I know this is a very difficult question to answer and depends on many things but any ball-park figures would be a great help. It would just be nice to know what other online sellers experiences are.

Regards

[hanuman]

i assume 5% is quite high for cross markets number, i would guess something around the 1.5% for CROSS MARKETS CONVERSION RATE....

but your miles might differ

[etechsupport]

Determining what conversion rate should be acceptable, I think it's a personal view.

10 sales per 1000 visitors to your website would give you a Conversion Rate of 1%.

I think most of the top website marketing companies can maintain maximum conversion rate to around 10% except few exceptional case.

[onlineleben]

I would say as long as you make a profit it is OK.
Then concentrate on improving
- check at which stages people are leaving your shopping cart
- improve these stages, so that people don't leave
- are your delivery cost listed before the cart or do you have to enter something into the cart to see delivery cost and availability. this would explain a big drop off as people are not aware of cost beforehand.

[etechsupport]

I think customers leave the shopping cart after getting online comparison with other competitors in terms of price and brand or feeling a sort of insecurity during online payment.

[Ben5082]

I read an article not long ago about ecommerce conversion study that said 75% of conversions from cart to checkout happen in the first 24 hours after it was added but the next 20% of conversions take over 4 weeks which left about 5% that take more than 4 weeks to convert.

Here is the article:
[useit.com...]

If that same kind of curve applies to your website maybe an auto email reminding users of items left in their cart would help decrease shopping cart abandonment.

[Easy_Coder]

Ben5082, I actually built that into my conversion tracker so I could see the latent stuff.

Right now for the 30 day period going back from today my conversions are averaging 2,645 minutes from the initial PPC click. I'm always astounded when someone comes back a couple weeks after the initial click to make a purchase.

My conversion to sale ranges from 3.5% to 13% and I'm in 1/2 dozen shopping comparison sites. Overall I avergage between 6-7%.

[Essex_boy]

Best I ever had was 25% leading up to Xmas 2003, never been anywhere near it since.

[gzlatin]

easy coder,

what software do you use to track conversions? Is it your own or something I can purchase? If not, can you recommend anything?

[maialee]

This would also really depend on how the visitors get there and how product-heavy your site is. If you force people in with pop-up ads or something, then your conversion rate is lower. If people are coming in looking for a particular product you carry, then it's higher. We have a lot of articles and informative stuff, so our conversion rate is generally around 1%. I would think that a site with only a few pages selling a few items that people are looking for when they find it would have a higher rate.

[etechsupport]

There are so many software available for tracking conversion like onestat.com, blizzardtracker,adtrackz.com. you can check there sites.

[gzlatin]

true, it also depends how unique your product is. If your'e the only one selling it, your conversion rate is probably higher. If 10 other websites are selling what your selling then it will be lower.

[Easy_Coder]

gzlatin, it's my own... I actually wrote it while I was at the New Orleans Conference. I had been flying along without conversion tracking and that all changed after 1 session at that show.

The solution is simple and uses asp, cookies and a couple of mssql tables and a handful of stored procedures.

I'd be willing to share the code; sticky me if you're interested.