how to calculate conversion rate

How to Correctly Calculate Conversion Rates: 3 Easy Formulas to Use

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Measure Everything When It Comes To Sales and Marketing

Measuring results is critical to business growth and development – with the right data, you can make your sales and marketing processes more cost efficient while empowering your whole team to sell more. It can be tricky to figure out what numbers are most important, but one number is especially critical to your company’s success: your conversion rate.

 

Do You Calculate Conversion Rates Correctly? Review and Learn These Three Simple Marketing Formulas, Plus Tips For Optimizing Your Conversion Rates.

Know How To Calculate Conversion Rates

Knowing how to calculate your conversion rate is a crucial piece of information for digital marketers. It's critical to being able to perform conversion rate analysis

 

Super simple conversion rate formula:  How much did you put in versus how much did you get out.  It also looks somewhat like the productivity formula. It's also a key SEO formula.

 

 

Your conversion rate is a measure of your marketing effort’s success, after all.  Within a system like Hubspot, you can find conversion analysis formulas, many of which are 'canned' reports but all of which can be suitably customized to your requirements.  You can tweak the SEO formulas to suit your particular needs with the reporting tool as well.

 

 

How do you calculate a conversion rate? Fortunately, calculating conversion rates isn’t hard for expert conversion rate consultants, who, with the right conversion rate calculation formulas – and with the right information, using proven conversion rate consulting practices coupled with knowledge of various digital marketing formulas, can continuously optimize your conversion rate to make your marketing campaigns more powerful.

Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) Calculator

If you want to find out how much additional profit you can make from CRO, we provide a simple, yet powerful, free online CRO calculator to help you set profit improvement targets.  It has many uses, for example, you can calculate how ecommerce conversion rate improvement effects profit.

 

Run Conversion Rate  Profit Improvement Calculator

 

How to Calculate Your Conversion Rate: What Is a Conversion Rate?

Simply put, your conversion rate is a percentage of how many conversions (or sales) you’ve had from a marketing campaign thus yielding a campaign conversion rate.  For example, lets say you have a lead capture form on a landing page.  The lead conversion rate for this form could be defined as how many page visitors (those who saw that form on that page) and completed the form.  From this simple conversion rate, you could track all the way back up your funnel and determine your click to lead rate formula.

 

Conversion Rate Meaning

 

Stated another way, a conversion rate is a measure of how much of one thing you got from another thing, once you performed some process on it.  It's not how to work out conversion rates that is difficult, it is gathering the data consistently.   That's why it is critical that you use conversion rate tracking methods that are consistent and repeatable.

Key Lead Conversion Metrics

 

You can calculate sales conversion rates across multiple marketing channels, including:

Email campaigns: Email conversion rates let you know how many people have become new customers as a result of email campaigns you’ve sent out.  You can calculate lead conversion rates for single emails or multiple email chains.  By using a consistent email conversion value formula, you can go beyond using average conversion rates and instead, use actual email sends to customer acquisition rates to determine the value of sending emails.

 

Paid advertisements:  Calculating advertising conversion rates for paid ads – either through a site like Google or social media channels – tells you how many new customers you gained from these services.  Paid ads are often one of the most focused upon conversion cost examples.  Leads converted from this channel often convert at lower rates than organic leads, however, they can often be had at much higher volumes.

Social media: The conversion rate for social media channels can give you a broad idea of how many people you’ve converted, or you can dive into the individual channels for better insight.

Social media and email campaign performance metrics can be easily checked with the right marketing tools – even social media platforms have their own free-to-use analytics tools. However, knowing how to calculate the conversion rate of any channel is an important skill. You may want information that is more detailed than what your marketing tools provide.  For example, your CRM conversion rate will often hide important information, which is not always apparent until you dig deeply into the numbers it is reporting.

 

Retail Website Conversion Rate formula:

 

Another typical conversion rate is the Retail Website Conversion Rate formula.  It is a crucial metric for businesses that operate online stores. It measures the percentage of website visitors who make a purchase, sign up for a newsletter, or take any desired action on the website.  You may know this as the e-commerce conversion rate, or, a retail store's conversion rate (this is usually different than a straight e-commerce website conversion rate, and there is often overlap, much comes down to measurement ability).  The formula retail store's use for calculating the conversion rate is quite simple: divide the number of conversions by the total number of website visitors and multiply it by 100 to get a percentage. For example, let's consider Amazon. If they had 10,000 visitors in a month and 500 of them made a purchase, their conversion rate would be 5%. This means that 5% of the visitors converted into customers. By monitoring and optimizing the conversion rate, businesses like Amazon can improve their marketing efforts, increase sales, and ultimately boost their profitability.

 

Calculating conversion rates and calculating conversion values for paid ads is the best way to find out if they are working. With a few simple conversation rate formulas, you can calculate conversion rates for various sales situations in your organization.

How to Calculate Your Conversion Rate: 3 Easy Formulas to Improve Your Marketing Efforts

Every business has different sales goals and marketing budgets, but these conversion calculation formulas offer simple methods to determine a variety of conversion rates you may want to calculate, such as sales conversion ratio.

Google Ads Conversion Rate Formula

If you just want a basic formula for understanding how many conversions come from ads, Google has the most simplistic approach to measuring your overall conversion rate:

 

Google Ads Conversion Rates

 

Number of conversions / number of total ad interactions = Ad conversion rate

 

You can make this formula more insightful by applying more specific criteria to the Google adwords conversion rate. For example, you could calculate the number of conversions in a specific state or compare conversions to ad interactions that happened during a specific time of day.

 

Pro-Tip.  Avoid issues by agreeing with all stakeholders how to calculate your sales close rate.

 

Ecommerce Conversion Rate Formula

Ecommerce stores are in a unique position to leverage their conversion rates and calculating them is relatively easy if you have access to the right data. The best formula for ecommerce conversions is:

 

Total ecommerce transactions / total visits to ecommerce site = Ecommerce conversion rate

This formula can be manipulated to give you other information about your ecommerce conversions. You could calculate conversions for specific products or product categories, or you could go further by determining how many transactions came from specific marketing channels.  You could also calculate website conversion rates overall. When it comes to how to calculate amazon conversion rates, it helps if you are running ads (and you probably will be), as then you can determine how many impressions and which keywords are driving your sales.  But the basic is the same.

Landing Page Conversion Rate Formula

Landing pages can be critical components of a marketing campaign. They can boost sales for new products or offer valuable information that leads to sales. A simple way to calculate this is:

 

Number of landing page conversions / number of visits to landing page = Landing page conversion rate

With a landing page, you have a lot of control over how people get to your site. You can calculate conversions from people who got to your landing page from an email campaign and you can understand how many new customers came from paid ads or social media campaigns.

How to Calculate Your Conversion Rate: Practical Tips for Conversion Rate Optimization

Conversion Analysis in Marketing Strategy Development

 

Knowing your conversion rate is just the start – your conversion rate can guide your marketing efforts and sales strategies. A fundamental goal of every conversion marketer should be to increase your conversion rate. While there are lots of studies out there on the average adwords conversion rate, smart marketers know that while knowing these averages is nice, it's their own conversion rate and how fast you're improving it that matters.   That means you need to optimize your conversion strategy.

 

The average Google AdWords (Google Search Ads) conversion rate for all industries is 3.75% for searches and 0.77% for display ads, but conversion rates vary from industry to industry. An individual Google Ads Campaign can vary dramatically, especially on the Google Search Network.  Dating companies, for example, have the highest conversion rates at 9.64% while real estate has the lowest at 2.47% -- a significant difference.  No matter which industry you're in, your company will want to know what conversion cost equation you're using as well as your conversion rate.  It is critical that you have agreement on how conversion rate measurements are actually being done in every marketing and sales channel you use, including even video ads, which can be notoriously difficult to track attribution.

 

Regardless of your industry, use these practical tips to optimize your conversion rates:

 

List segmentation: Segmenting your email lists can lead to better conversion rates – with segmentation, you’re getting the right message to the right person. Incorporate personalization and a compelling CTA to boost the conversion potential.  When performing the conversion analysis process, your ability to segment effectively will dramatically affect your conversion funnel.

Target marketing: Improving your ad conversion rates requires you to target your customers more effectively. That means you need to analyze your customer data and pinpoint characteristics that make up your most frequent buyers. Surveys can help you understand your customers, as well.

Multichannel approach: When you’re launching a new product or landing page, use a multichannel approach to boost your conversion rates – social media, email campaigns, paid advertisements, landing pages, and blogs. This will increase the number of people who see your campaign.

 

Conversion rate optimization simply means you want to increase the number of conversions you get from a specific marketing interaction or campaign – you want to make your marketing campaigns more efficient.

Why Conversion Rate Optimization Is Critical to Your Business

Your conversion rate is a measure of how successful your marketing efforts are at finding and exploiting aggregate demand.

 

Ad Formula System Affects Aggregate Demand

 

Do your ads convert enough new people to make them worth the investment? Are your email campaigns generating new business or falling stagnant? You want your marketing campaigns to make an impact. They need to help you grow your business.  

 

Aggregate Demand Formula

 

The Aggregate Demand Formula is a crucial tool for understanding the impact of your conversion rates on your ability to take advantage of demand. In simple terms, the aggregate demand formula measures the total demand for goods and services in an economy at a given price level and period of time. It takes into account the spending by consumers, businesses, government, and net exports. Your conversion rates play a significant role in determining the level of demand you can effectively capture. If your conversion rates are high, it means that a larger percentage of potential customers are taking action and making purchases, resulting in increased demand for your products or services. On the other hand, if your conversion rates are low, it indicates that you are not effectively converting potential customers into actual buyers, which can limit your ability to tap into the existing demand in the market. Therefore, it is essential to continually optimize and improve your conversion rates to maximize your ability to capitalize on demand and drive business growth.

 

Conversion rate optimization is a crucial component of making your business more efficient and knowing how to calculate your conversion rate is the first step in optimizing your marketing campaigns.  Successful CRO depends upon fast, easy, consistent, reliable measurement.  We've made it easy with our online CRO Profit Improvement Calculator.

 

Run Conversion Rate  Profit Improvement Calculator

 

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Lonnie D. Ayers, PMP

About the Author: Lonnie Ayers is a Hubspot Certified Inbound Marketing consultant, with additional certifications in Hubspot Content Optimization, Hubspot Contextual Marketing, and is a Hubspot Certified Partner. Specialized in demand generation and sales execution, especially in the SAP, Oracle and Microsoft Partner space, he has unique insight into the tough challenges Service Providers face with generating leads and closing sales using the latest digital tools. With 15 years of SAP Program Management experience, and dozens of complex sales engagements under his belt, he helps partners develop and communicate their unique sales proposition. Frequently sought as a public speaker in various events, he is available for both inhouse engagements and remote coaching.
Balanced Scorecard Consultant

He also recently released a book "How to Dominate Any Market - Turbocharging Your Digital Marketing and Sales Results", which is available on Amazon.

View All Articles by Lonnie D. Ayers, PMP

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