Calculation of conversion rate

Your conversion rate tells you how many of your visitors actually become customers. If you have 100 visits on your webshop and 5 of those make a purchase, your conversion rate is 5%. It is important that you can calculate your conversion rate as it gives you an insight into how well your website is performing in terms of sales. It is also a number that potential investors will be interested in seeing.

Number of sales / visits = conversion rate

The equation above is how Google Analytics calculates your conversion rate. Diving deeper, there are several factors to consider when working with conversion rate calculations, depending whether you are looking to measure the number of unique visitors or all visitors.

With the tool below you can enter your data and see what your conversion rate is.

Please note that Google Analytics bases their data on cookies. Today, many of us have access to multiple devices and Google does not have the ability to tell whether it is the same person who first visits your website from their PC and later on their smartphone, or it is two different people.

It will be registered as two unique people if you start the entire customer journey from your phone and later complete a conversion on your smartphone, which will reduce your conversion rate, compared to if the entire purchase was made from your smartphone.

Make reservations for unique visitors

If you run a webshop where the decision-making process is longer, it is likely that the customer has visited your website several times before making a purchase. This is typically the case for more expensive products, such as appliances or technology. Here it is important that you look at unique visitors instead of “total visitors”.

However, if you have a webshop where the product is considered cheaper and you can buy it impulsively, there is a chance that users will buy it the first time they visit your website. In this case, you will get a realistic picture of your conversion rate as it is.

What is a good conversion rate?

NB: For webshops, we measure a purchase as a conversion.

Depending on the industry, what constitutes a good conversion rate differs from industry to industry. Stores are different, so you can never make a sure comparison, but there are some commonalities in the industry. Most webshops have a conversion rate of 1-2%. However, if you run a flower shop and have an online store, the conversion rate can be sky-high.