What Is a Website Conversion?

What makes a visitor on your site become a customer or a subscriber? Understanding website conversions – the critical events that signal achieving your business goals – is fundamental to driving success.

Whether you aim to increase magazine subscriptions or boost recurring sales in your online store, mastering conversion tracking and conversion rate optimization is key to improving website conversions.

This guide will break down various types of website goals and demonstrate effective strategies to enhance conversion rates, directly linking these improvements to increased profitability. Discover how to transform passive website interactions into active customer engagements and significantly uplift your bottom line.

Note: This post was written in 2019 and has been completely updated based on the recent updates in September 2024.

A website conversion occurs when a visitor completes a desired action on your website. This action can vary depending on the website’s goals, but common examples include filling out a form, making a purchase, subscribing to a newsletter, or downloading an e-book.

Website conversions are a crucial metric for businesses, as they indicate the effectiveness of their website in achieving its intended purpose. By tracking and analyzing these conversions, businesses can gain valuable insights into user behavior and optimize their strategies to increase website conversions.

Understanding the different types of conversions is essential for effective conversion rate optimization. There are two main types of conversions: micro conversions and macro conversions.

Micro conversions are smaller actions that visitors take on a website, which can ultimately lead to a macro conversion. Examples of micro conversions include:

• Signing up for a newsletter
• Downloading an e-book or whitepaper
• Watching a video
• Filling out a survey
• Clicking on a call-to-action (CTA) button

Micro conversions are important because they indicate that a visitor is engaged with the website and is taking steps towards becoming a customer. These actions, while not the primary goal, are critical in guiding potential customers through the conversion funnel and toward a macro conversion.

Macro conversions, on the other hand, are the primary goals of a website. They are the actions that a business wants visitors to take, such as:

• Making a purchase
• Filling out a contact form
• Signing up for a free trial
• Becoming a paying customer

Macro conversions are the ultimate goal of a website, and micro conversions are the stepping stones that lead to them. By focusing on both micro and macro conversions, businesses can create a comprehensive strategy to improve their overall conversion rate and achieve their business objectives.

A website's conversion rate is a key metric in digital marketing that quantifies the effectiveness of your site by measuring the percentage of visitors who take a desired action out of the total visitors. Only about 22% of businesses are satisfied with their conversion rates.

This action could be:

• opening an email
• completing a website form
• participating in a giveaway
• purchasing

A higher conversion rate indicates more efficient content and marketing strategies.

Conversions are pivotal moments that transition users towards becoming customers, guided by calls to action. Once visitors convert, they should be tracked in a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system, enhancing targeting precision throughout their journey in the marketing funnel.

Achieving conversions is crucial, as each signifies a step closer to customer acquisition, underscoring the importance of crafting compelling content and marketing campaigns designed to maximize conversion opportunities.

To calculate your website’s conversion rate, follow these steps:

1. Define what a conversion is: Determine what actions on your website you consider as conversions. This could be anything from signing up for a newsletter, making a purchase, filling out a contact form, or any other key action that aligns with your business goals.
2. Track the number of conversions: Over a specific period of time (such as a month), keep track of how many times the defined conversion actions are completed. You can use analytics tools or tracking software to help with this.
3. Determine the total number of site visitors: Find out how many unique visitors your website has during the same timeframe. This information can also be obtained from analytics tools.

Use the following formula to calculate your conversion rate:

By following these steps, you’ll be able to calculate your website’s conversion rate and gain insights into how effective your site is at converting visitors into customers or leads. Keep in mind that conversion rates vary depending on various factors such as industry, target audience, and website design.

Here are some hypothetical scenarios to illustrate how to apply this formula:

Imagine you're a musician selling tickets for an upcoming concert through your website. After promoting the event and directing traffic to your site, you decide to evaluate the success rate of these efforts by tracking ticket sales and your defined conversion.

In March, your website attracted 1,176 visitors, with 56 of them buying concert tickets.

Using the formula:

This result indicates a 4.8% conversion rate, showing the percentage of visitors who purchased.

Consider you're a fitness instructor offering free online workout tutorials and e-books on your site, asking for visitors' email addresses in return.

Defining a conversion as a signup for your materials, you find that in July, out of 635 visitors, 21 signed up. Applying the formula:

This reveals a 3.3% conversion rate, indicating the proportion of visitors who signed up.

To begin monitoring your website's conversion rate, it's essential to establish goal tracking by setting up conversion events in a web analytics platform like Google Analytics 4 (GA4). Unlike previous versions, GA4 focuses on events rather than sessions, requiring you to define specific user interactions as conversion events. This approach offers more flexibility and precision in tracking the actions most relevant to your business objectives.

This service tracks conversions, collects visitor information, and helps you understand who converts and what pages are better than others at getting people to perform desired actions. Marketing is all about making a business profitable. Conversions are a crucial indicator of whether marketing efforts are worth the investment.

The conversion rate indicates the percentage of users who have taken profitable actions for your business. It shows whether your website converts visitors into buyers, or just lets them go without purchasing or sharing their contact information.

Each analytics system has its rough edges that are easily avoidable if you understand the meaning of the metrics and possible analytical traps.

What are good and bad conversion rates? The short answer is it depends. There’s no magic value. Rather, it’s a matter of opinion.

What you consider good and bad depends on a wide range of factors, and comparing your conversion rate to others without a proper approach might make you worry too much.

For example, say you have a new e-commerce store with handmade Japanese treats, and your conversion event lands on the “Thank-you” page after you make a purchase. In this scenario, you can be quite happy with a 2–4% conversion rate; a 0.5% change won’t mean all that much.

On the other hand, if you’re a mature retailer like Amazon with millions of visitors, a decrease of 0.5% will lead to losses in the millions of dollars.

These examples show us that a “good” CR is relative.

While exploring the market and building customer relationships, each business gathers best practices based on what works well for them. A conversion rate can only be seen as good or bad compared to others. You can make this comparison through benchmarking, competitor analysis, etc.

The most important comparison is to your conversion rate for a previous period. You must grow at your own pace, maintaining profitability and optimizing your spending. To increase your conversion rate, consider strategies like utilizing high-quality visuals, customer testimonials, and optimizing user experiences.

Let’s take a brief look at what influences the conversion rate:

• Technical issues
• The quality of a landing page: loading speed, intuitiveness of design, convenience of navigation and menus, reliability, security certificates
• Other characteristics: device, platform, location
• Traffic source (where your customers come from)
• Buyer’s segment or cohort, buyer’s habits, and level of brand awareness
• Call-to-action: promotion, position, design, and text
• The tone of voice, brand communications, reliability

All of these factors form a complicated corridor of web pages and actions along the customer journey. Your first task is to make this journey as smooth as possible. If your CR is low, and you want to increase your website performance, each item in this list offers a possibility for you to improve your conversion rate.

You can get an idea of an average conversion rate in benchmark reports for your industry, based on the approximate type and size of your business. Even data on your direct competitor’s conversion rate might be a motivational punch for some time. But again, neither benchmarks nor competitors’ CRs can be your baseline, as each business’s effectiveness, is calculated differently; a 0.5% difference can be a devastating loss for one company and okay for another.

By the way, learn how and why your competitors can influence your conversion rate with their pricing to know how you can control this situation. To find a canonical CR for your business, you have to rely on other metrics, such as CAC, LTV, and gross margin. You should always calculate your CR in connection with these metrics.

Improving your conversion rate is never-ending; whenever you reach the benchmark for your local market, you can move further to the country level and even global benchmarks. Everything you do to improve your conversion rate is called conversion rate optimization.

The average website conversion rate varies depending on the industry, niche, and type of website. However, here are some general benchmarks:

• Average website conversion rate: 2-5%
• E-commerce websites: 2-4%
• B2B websites: 5-10%
• Landing pages: 5-15%

It’s essential to note that these are general benchmarks, and the ideal conversion rate for a website depends on its specific goals and target audience. By understanding these benchmarks, businesses can set realistic expectations and develop strategies to improve their website conversion rates.

Average conversion rates can provide a baseline for measuring the effectiveness of a website. However, it’s essential to understand that conversion rates can vary depending on various factors, such as:

• Industry and niche
• Target audience and demographics
• Website design and user experience
• Marketing strategies and tactics
• Competition and market trends

By understanding these factors, businesses can set realistic conversion rate goals and develop strategies to improve their website’s conversion rate.

Regularly analyzing and comparing your conversion rates with industry benchmarks can help identify areas for improvement and guide your conversion rate optimization efforts.

In GA4, website conversion rate optimization has evolved, focusing on event tracking and conversion goals. This shift allows for more detailed analysis and customization, enabling businesses to pinpoint and enhance key user interactions that drive conversions, providing a sophisticated approach to understanding and improving the pathways to conversion success.

In GA4, what were traditionally known as "goals" are now called "conversions." You'll first need to identify key user actions that align with your business objectives to set up conversions.

To set up a conversion, you need to set up your Google Analytics account and follow the instructions, navigate to the Events section after choosing what kind of goal you want to establish:

• Visiting certain URLs
• Spending a certain amount of time on a page
• Going deeper on your website, measured by pages per visit
• Completing events, such as clicking on widgets or spending a certain amount of time watching videos

As you can see, there are plenty of ways to set up your conversions in the form of goals.

In the Conversions URLs tab in Google Analytics 4, you can find a list of URLs marked as end for goal completion. Here, you can see approximate goal values according to the number of completed goals. And all goals can’t have the same value.

Suppose, for an online store, the goal of subscriptions is less important than the goal of purchases. If you sell products, your macro goal will be to ensure the visitor makes a purchase. However, the visitor may need to complete other micro-goals before fulfilling the macro goal.

For example, a visitor must enter the website, choose a product, add it to the cart, proceed to checkout, enter payment and delivery information, and only then make a purchase. Micro goals are essential for marketers to investigate because they hide why people leave and don’t convert into customers.

While setting up conversions, it's possible to assign values to different conversions, recognizing that not all actions hold the same weight toward achieving your business goals. For example, a purchase might hold more value than a newsletter sign-up. GA4's flexible event modeling allows for a nuanced analysis of these conversion values.

For users looking to leverage Google Ads data within GA4, linking your accounts can provide access to Smart Goals and enhanced measurement features, offering precision in tracking ad performance and its impact on website conversions.

Setting up conversions in GA4 is vital for any business seeking to optimize its online presence. This event-driven approach not only disciplines your marketing efforts but also sets a benchmark for successful user interactions.

By understanding and analyzing the pathways your visitors take toward conversion, you're better equipped to identify bottlenecks, optimize the user journey, and ultimately grow your business through informed data-driven decisions.

In Google Analytics 4 (GA4), the focus shifts from viewing average conversion rates (CRs) as seen in the traditional Goals > Overview tab to a more nuanced and actionable analysis of conversion events. This change addresses the misleading nature of relying solely on "medium" and "average" CRs, which often lack depth and fail to account for the varying significance of different conversion actions.

Averaging CRs across all types of conversions dilutes the actionable insights that can be derived from your data. In GA4, every conversion event can be tracked individually, acknowledging that not all conversions are created equal. For example, a purchase is generally more valuable than a newsletter signup. This nuanced approach allows for a more accurate assessment of what drives value for your business.

• Segmented Analysis: GA4 encourages analyzing CR by specific user segments or conversion types. This tailored analysis helps understand how factors contribute to your overall conversion performance, allowing for more targeted optimization strategies.
• Monitoring Trends: Monitoring CR changes over time is essential for identifying trends and assessing the impact of changes to your site or marketing strategies. GA4's real-time and historical data capabilities provide a comprehensive view of these trends.
• Understanding the Impact of CR Changes: Knowing the financial implications of CR fluctuations is crucial. GA4 helps you identify where your conversion funnel might leak by highlighting drop-off points and user behaviors leading up to conversions.
• Attribution Modeling: GA4 offers advanced attribution modeling tools, enabling a clearer understanding of how each marketing channel contributes to conversions. This insight is vital for allocating marketing budgets and efforts more effectively and ensuring that you invest in channels that genuinely drive conversions.

Attribution is an instrument that helps you understand the impact of each channel on your conversions by modeling the value distribution for each step in the funnel.

Google Analytics 4 (GA4) brings a more sophisticated approach to attribution, designed to address some of the limitations inherent in previous versions of Google Analytics.

GA4's attribution models are designed to offer a broader and more flexible view of how each marketing channel contributes to conversions, moving beyond the narrow scope traditionally observed. This expanded approach includes more touchpoints and utilizes a data-driven model by default, which better reflects the complexity of modern customer journeys.

However, despite these advancements, challenges in attribution accuracy and channel valuation may persist. GA4's models, while advanced, might still lead to underestimation or overestimation of certain channels due to the complex nature of multitouch attribution and the difficulties in perfectly modeling the nonlinear paths customers take.

But typically, they make things even more complicated, leaving some channels under or overestimated because of logical limits and flaws in models. This leads to wasting money on inefficient ad campaigns or mistaken ideas about the efficiency of the whole company’s marketing.

To avoid this situation, we created OWOX BI Attribution, a product that helps you distribute values using a funnel-like attribution model with proven efficiency. It’s the most viable alternative to Google Analytics 4 models, considering their weaknesses and the growing needs of businesses to correctly track all of a customer’s steps that lead to a conversion.

Any traffic changes may decrease or increase the conversion rate, as can changes in your advertising strategy or technical issues. Let’s see what to do to make conversion rates better.

Conversion rate optimization (CRO) helps your customers convert more efficiently and thus increases the conversion rate. It’s used by CRO developers, UX designers, and marketers to improve the website and the customer journey. Here’s what conversion rate optimization typically entails.

Technical issues are always the most important for CRO. Start by optimizing the load speed, debugging JavaScript errors, and testing all CTAs and landing pages. Your conversion rate will never increase if pages with goals contain errors and send the wrong responses, and this will be mirrored in your profits.

Also, a website’s security, cookies, and personal data policies matter more to visitors today than five years ago. Show people that you care about the safety of their data and use only reliable services, especially for payment. An SSL certificate is a must. Customers view a store as trustworthy if it has an 'https://" address.

A/B testing, pivotal in Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) projects, involves comparing different versions of a web page to determine which one yields higher conversions. This process begins by clearly defining the conversion goal, such as increasing sales, signups, or email click-through rates, focusing on a single variable to ensure clarity in results.

Utilizing analytics tools like Google Analytics 4 is essential to identify where users disengage, whether during the shopping cart phase or earlier. Based on these insights, propose specific changes – like adjusting the visibility of the “add to cart” button – to rectify identified issues potentially.

Deciding which changes to the test, prioritize those that are straightforward to implement or likely to have the most significant impact. Employ an A/B testing tool to randomly assign visitors to the original page or a modified version, ensuring a controlled experiment.

To achieve statistical significance, the test duration should align with your usual conversion timeline. Finally, analyze the outcomes to determine whether the proposed changes effectively increase conversions, adjusting your strategy as needed based on these results. Inconclusive outcomes may necessitate a more extended test duration to gather meaningful data.

An attractive and comfortable website is no longer a luxury but a requirement. Try to improve your brand and invent new graphical elements to refresh your website’s look. This will increase interest and make the path to conversion more pleasant. More tips and tricks:

1. Tell a story about your products or services with the help of design. Show how they work and allow people to feel the product. Hire a UI/UX consultant or designer to investigate your website and show you room for improvement.
2. Put the suitable CTA in the right place. If you want people to answer your CTAs, make them clear and visible. Don’t mess with hundreds of them. Choose those that are explicitly connected with conversions.
3. Help people to solve a problem. Remove everything that might lead them astray.
4. Better online merchandising is necessary for your conversion success. What products will be presented at the top and why? How will people react if products have low-quality images or are poorly described? These things will influence a person’s desire to buy or ask for your services, thus influencing the conversion rate.

In modern web design, less is more. Don’t try to add too much or strike your customer with neon-like pop-ups and red buttons—it will harm your conversion rate.

Content is king, so make it understandable. All CTAs should help people take the desired action. Sometimes, visitors are eager to bypass the conventional buyer’s journey, preferring to engage directly with a sales representative.

To convert these high-intent visitors into marketing qualified leads (MQLs), strategically designed web pages, persuasive copy, and effective CTAs are employed. Ensure that your SEO-optimized articles are helpful; find content that doesn’t work and improve it constantly until it becomes fruitful and leads to conversions.

Your style also matters in every word on your website. Don’t be shy about getting closer to your client. Remember that even a 'Buy Now' button may be more attractive if it’s adapted to the context of your website. If you sell candies, a 'Buy Now, Sweetie' button may work better than a simple 'Buy Now.'

Also, Lead flows are a critical element for enhancing your site's conversion rate. They function as high-converting pop-ups crafted to capture attention and provide value. Options include a slide-in box, a drop-down banner, or a pop-up box tailored to fit the nature of your offer.

CRO, with the help of remarketing, is part of healthy marketing. Everybody knows getting a customer to return is cheaper than obtaining a new one. The SEMrush Sales Funnel optimization approach will help you make the remarketing process seamless.

Furthermore, effective remarketing campaigns leverage user data to personalize ads, enhancing relevance and engagement. By analyzing previous interactions, businesses can tailor their messages based on specific pages visited or items viewed, creating a customized experience that resonates with the user.

This level of personalization improves your campaigns' effectiveness and strengthens the connection between your brand and its audience. Additionally, integrating remarketing with other CRO strategies, such as conversion funnel optimization, can amplify its impact, leading to even higher conversion rates.

Ultimately, a well-executed remarketing strategy becomes an indispensable component of a comprehensive digital marketing plan, driving growth and customer retention.

Make your payment and shipment process as easy as possible. Each second of waiting and each additional checkout page leads to lost customers and decreases your CR. Customers want to save time, understand what’s happening, and rely on your service.

Transparent communication about shipping costs, taxes, and estimated delivery times at the outset can prevent surprises that might deter a customer from completing their purchase.

Moreover, offering express checkout options for returning customers, where personal details and payment information are securely saved, can significantly expedite the checkout process. Implementing a progress indicator during checkout can also help inform customers how many steps remain, reducing frustration and perceived wait time.

You can establish automated workflows to streamline team operations by leveraging marketing automation software. For instance, marketing automation allows for the dispatch of computerized emails, enabling leads to schedule meetings with representatives in a single click while also alerting reps to high-intent actions like pricing page visits.

In the ecommerce sector, sending reminder emails to individuals who abandon their shopping carts can significantly boost conversions. Research by Moosend highlights the effectiveness of abandoned cart emails, noting a 45% open rate, with 21% of these emails receiving clicks and half of those clicks resulting in purchases.

Boosting your website's conversion rate is essential for maximizing the effectiveness of your online presence. You can significantly enhance user engagement and convert more visitors into loyal customers by implementing strategic best practices, such as optimizing landing pages, simplifying user journeys, and leveraging data-driven insights. Here are key strategies to achieve this goal.

• Utilize a CRO Planner: Streamline your conversion rate optimization strategy with a comprehensive planner to identify and implement effective changes systematically.
• Simplify Forms & Add Social Proof: Reduce form length to lower barriers for submission, and incorporate social proof like testimonials to build credibility and trust with visitors.
• Enable Live Chat & Conduct A/B Testing: Integrate live chat for real-time assistance, enhancing user experience. Regularly perform A/B testing on various elements to find the most compelling versions.
• Increase Trust by Removing Friction: Work on increasing your site's trustworthiness through secure badges and transparent privacy policies, and remove any elements that could cause friction in the conversion process.
• Launch Abandoned Cart Email Campaigns: Recover potential sales with targeted email campaigns for users who have abandoned their shopping carts, gently nudging them back towards completing their purchase.
• Clarify Your Value Proposition & Use Strong CTAs: Make your value proposition clear and compelling to articulate why customers should choose you. Ensure your calls to action are strong and direct to encourage conversions.
• Enhance Page Speed & Mobile Optimization: Speed up your site to prevent user drop-off due to slow loading times. Optimize your website for mobile users to ensure a seamless experience across devices.
• Localize Content & Be Creative in Mobile Marketing: Tailor your content to meet your target audience's cultural and linguistic preferences. Utilize creative strategies in mobile marketing to engage users effectively and encourage conversions.

You may find your recipe for a 400% conversion rate, but we advise you to start with the principles listed below.

Dos:

• Choose KPIs to control the situation. Starting with the CR, get in the habit of monitoring and planning CRO, working over bottlenecks in the funnel, and smoothing the goal flow.
• Care about the people you’re working for — your end customers. Consider their buying habits and preferences at each stage of website improvement.
• Care about the services you’re adding to your website. Try to set them up to exclude misleading analytics and data loss. Use OWOX BI to feel totally secure about your data.
• Care about your company’s communications beyond the website: on social media, on referral platforms, etc. Get good reviews, get mentions by trend leaders, and collect feedback. This will help you keep your traffic fresh and your product trustworthy.

Don'ts:

• Don’t make conversion a main KPI for your business. Conversion is important, but only in complex analysis with other metrics. Get a sound view of the conversion rate.
• Don’t misunderstand CRO. Changing the color of buttons isn’t a CRO process. Stop it and understand what really distracts people from converting on your website.

Don’t forget to update conversions in Google Analytics 4 if your website technically changes a lot or if you change the checkout, delivery, or payment pages.