Website Conversion Rate: What is Average?
This blog entry was posted on November 17, 2008.
You work hard to bring visitors to your website. But many leave without taking any action. How can you tell if your website is giving you a good return on your investment? Are you getting above average or below average results?
Conversion is persuading your visitors to do what you want them to. This could be making a purchase, requesting a quote or signing up for your newsletter. The conversion rate for a website would be the number of visitors who took action out of the total number of visitors.
Conversion rate is much like taking your temperature when you aren’t feeling well. It can tell you if you are sick, but it can’t tell you what is wrong. It is a good measure to track to see if changes you are making are truly helping. This can vary tremendously by the type of website and is a commonly used eCommerce metric.
Typical Conversion Rates
2-3% conversion seems to be the accepted norm. A Forrester research study (August 2007 ) places the ratio of orders to overall site visits at 2.9 percent for eCommerce stores. eCommerce websites will typically range from .5% to 8% visitor conversions.
For lead generation and other non eCommerce websites, conversion rates will range 2.9 to 6 percent. Adding a clear lead generation form can boost conversions to the 8%-20% range.
Top eCommerce Conversions
So how are the top eCommerce websites doing? These are the top 10 converting websites for May 2008*. These are based on Nielsen Panel data.
- ProFlowers 35.70%
- Office Depot 31.40%
- Blair.com 23.80%
- FTD.com 21.30%
- QVC 18.70%
- CDW 17.90%
- Lands End 17.50%
- 1800flowers.com 16.80%
- Drugstore.com 16.20%
- HSN.com 15.80%
*Source: Nielsen Online / Marketing Charts
If You Like this posting please +1 it!
Related posts:
Filed under: Internet Marketing,Website Design
This entry was posted on Monday, November 17th, 2008 at 5:41 am and is filed under Internet Marketing, Website Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.5 Comments
RSS feed for comments on this post. | TrackBack URL
I would have been far more interested to see the top conversion rates of websites who did not attract business simply because there name has been familiar for nearly a decade or more. I would be interested to see the conversions of e-commerce sites that simply advertise on Google and manage to convert people who come to their site looking for the product advertised.
Comment by Delana — March 17, 2009 @ 7:30 pm
What I mean is, people will visit Office Depot, not because they are browsing, however because they know to go there to get their office supplies, if even by habit. That alone is surely half their conversion rate. Otherwise, your article was very interesting. Thank you.
Comment by Delana — March 17, 2009 @ 7:32 pm
Delana- Your comments are interesting. How much of conversion is familiarity with the website where we buy out of habit vs. being a website that does everything right? Does anyone else have thoughts on this?
Comment by Doug Williams — March 18, 2009 @ 1:53 am
Hi, I’ve been a web designer for over 11 years now and from what I’ve seen the conversion greatly depends on the quality of the site and how trustworthy it is. For example, all of the sites listed on top have been advertised on TV, they have highly visible security and they are all well known brands. This all ads to their credibility and therefore increases the conversion rate. On the other hand, if your site is old or ugly, has no security certificate and sells products that requires credit cards or even if it is just asking for lead info it will be very hard to get them without something to back your site up.
Comment by Robert — June 12, 2009 @ 9:01 pm
nhom mua…
[...]Website Conversion Rate: What is Average? | Doug Williams SEO Services[...]…
Trackback by nhom mua — October 23, 2011 @ 12:28 pm