What is a good conversion rate? Benchmarks and how to raise yours

Short answer: a good conversion rate is one that beats your own last month and matches pages like yours. As a rough guide, landing pages convert at a median of about 6.6 percent, online shops at about 1.5 to 3 percent and B2B websites often turn 1 to 3 percent of visitors into leads. The figure depends entirely on what you count as a conversion, the traffic you get and what you sell.

What is a conversion rate?

Conversion rate is the share of visitors who do what you want them to do. A conversion can be a purchase, a quote request, a booked meeting, a download or a phone call. In Google Analytics 4, the most important events are called key events, actions that matter most to your business (Google Analytics Help).

Conversion rate shows how much you get from the traffic you already have. Double it and you get as many new customers as if you had doubled your traffic, without buying a single extra click.

How to calculate your conversion rate

Conversion rate = conversions ÷ visitors × 100

Example: a landing page has 2,000 visitors in a month and gets 50 enquiries. 50 ÷ 2,000 × 100 = 2.5 percent.

Decide what counts as a visitor. Google Analytics can count the share of sessions with a conversion or the share of users, and you can choose whether an event counts once per session or every time it happens (Google Analytics Help). Different choices give different figures, so stick to one method when comparing over time.

Benchmarks: what is a good conversion rate?

These figures come from international studies and should be read as a direction, not a target.

In e-commerce the differences between industries are large. According to Dynamic Yield, beauty converts at around 5.3 percent, fashion 2.8 percent and furniture 1.3 percent (Shopify). The B2B figures come from one agency's own client data and are less certain than the others.

An example from our own work: after we rebuilt the website for consultancy RTL Consulting, contact enquiries rose by 30 percent.

Why the figures don't compare directly

• Different conversions. A newsletter sign-up is easier to get than a £20,000 quote request.
• Different traffic. Visitors from an ad for a specific keyword convert better than visitors from a blog post.
• Different denominators. Sessions, users and ad clicks give different figures. Unbounce reports a median, others report an average.
• Different prices. The more expensive and considered the purchase, the lower the conversion rate and the higher the value per conversion.

The most useful comparison is therefore your own page against itself over time. Also track what conversions lead to. A higher conversion rate with worse leads is not an improvement.

Seven ways to raise your conversion rate

1. Make the page faster. In a study by Deloitte and Google, a mobile site that was a tenth of a second faster saw 8.4 percent more conversions in retail and 10.1 percent in travel (Deloitte). Vodafone improved the load time of its largest page element by 31 percent in an A/B test and got 8 percent more sales (web.dev). Read Core Web Vitals explained.
2. One page, one goal. Remove menus and links that lead away from what you want the visitor to do. That is the basis of good conversion rate optimisation.
3. Match the message to what the visitor clicked. If the ad promises a fixed price, the page should open with the price.
4. Shorten the form. Only ask for what you need to take the next step. Baymard has shown that the average checkout has almost twice as many form fields as necessary (Baymard Institute).
5. Show reviews and results. Researchers at Northwestern University found that a product with five reviews was 270 percent more likely to be bought than one with none (Spiegel Research Center). Read Google reviews for business.
6. Be clear about costs. Unexpected extra costs are the most common reason shoppers abandon checkout, cited by 40 percent in Baymard's survey (Baymard Institute). Show delivery costs early, and offer the payment methods UK shoppers expect, such as Apple Pay, PayPal and Klarna.
7. Make the next step obvious. A button with a concrete action, such as "Get a quote within 24 hours", beats "Submit".

If you sell online, see what makes a shop convert on our e-commerce website design page. If your traffic comes from ads, conversion rate directly affects what each customer costs. Read What is a good ROAS?

Test it properly

Change one thing at a time and measure the effect. In an A/B test, two versions are shown to different visitors at the same time. Decide in advance how big a difference you want to detect and how many visitors that needs, run the test for at least a full week, and do not stop it just because one version leads early. The usual threshold for statistical significance is 95 percent (Optimizely).

If your page has too little traffic to test, make the improvements with strong research behind them and compare month on month.