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What is Conversion Rate?

Conversion rate is the share of visitors who take the action you want. Here is how to calculate it and why it decides whether your traffic is worth anything.

Definition

Conversion rate is the percentage of people who complete a desired action, such as making a purchase, booking a call or submitting an enquiry form, out of the total number of people who had the chance to.

Why it matters for a small business

Traffic is only worth what it converts. A small business can double its enquiries either by doubling its traffic, which is slow and expensive, or by improving its conversion rate, which is often faster and free.

Conversion rate is where wasted ad spend hides. If you are paying for clicks that land on a page that does not convert, the problem is not the ads, it is the page.

Tracking conversion rate by source shows you which channels send buyers and which send browsers, so you can stop judging channels by traffic volume alone.

Worked example

An accountant's website gets 1,000 visitors in a month and receives 20 enquiry-form submissions. The conversion rate is 20 divided by 1,000, which is 2 percent.

If the site is redesigned so the enquiry form is clear, the trust signals are obvious and the page loads fast, that rate might lift to 4 percent.

At the same 1,000 visitors, that is 40 enquiries instead of 20, a doubling of leads with no extra spend on traffic at all.

How In-House handles it

In-House builds and maintains your website with conversion as the job, not decoration: clear calls to action, fast load times and the structure that turns a visitor into an enquiry.

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