Conversion Stats

Is there a national average.

[5x54u]

I carefully produce reports for trafiic conversion and what not for my customers. One of my small customers is realizing an 8% average weekly conversion to leads from vistors to the site. Weekly traffic averages 1000 or so unique vistors a week.

My question is this: Is there a site that publishes vague statistics for a certain field or service so that I might compare my reports to theirs?

Thank you

[cgrantski]

I have never seen that for free as it's valuable competitive information that tends to be closely held. But, I worked on a site a couple years ago that had an 18% conversion rate (visits to purchase) and they were cited by Fortune as "best conversion rate for a commerce site" or something like that, so I assume Fortune did their homework and 18% really was good. But for a specific industry ... Nielsen-Comscore-Jupiter-Forrester etc have pretty good estimates of these numbers for their subscribers - you'll need an extra $25-$75,000 to get access to the data from the main sources out there. Mostly I wouldn't worry about it. The conversion rate depends so much on the quality of visitors coming in, which has to do with whether you're bringing in former customers through emails, having sales, have ads that will bring just about any curious person ... if your incoming visitor population is padded with a lot of junk visitors, your conversion drops just because of that. I've never seen a conversion comparison that I felt was worth the time spent doing it.

That said, a lot of sites I have worked with, multi-million-dollar sites, would be very happy with 8%.

[wingslevel]

Internet Retailer's top 300 average 2.5% - Again, these are rough numbers but most of these sites have some comscore data and many are public companies so you can figure out what their web sales are - then all you have to do is guess the average order size to get the conversion %.