Comments on: What should your conversion rate be?

By: Rick Whittington

Rick Whittington — Wed, 05 May 2010 12:49:45 +0000

J.D.,

You’re right that the Fireclick index measures online retail conversion rates. I’m not aware of a service similar to Fireclick that measures B2B service conversion rates.

Since I wrote this article nearly two years ago, I’ve become interested in B2B conversion rates for this very reason — there are no standards per se.

In B2B sales, lead generation is the “goal” rather than a sale or transaction. You should read a more recent blog post about using contact forms for lead generation. Rather than measuring conversion rate on B2B service sites, what we do is optimize the site to capture the greatest number of leads possible.

By: J.D.

J.D. — Wed, 05 May 2010 10:36:32 +0000

Fireclick is interesting, but doesn’t include service providers — only product eCommerce. I’m also looking into Facebook, like most people these days. Since this article was written a while ago, what’s your updated take on that?

By: Daniel

Daniel — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 19:46:28 +0000

So how do you go about improving your CR if it’s ABOVE the average rate listed on the Fireclick Index? What’s the mindset when setting out to do this? The same as being under I would assume?

By: Miva Merchant Developer

Miva Merchant Developer — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 16:07:09 +0000

Miva Merchant is coming out with a 1-step checkout as an enhancement to version 5.5 later this year. It will have an AJAX-enabled tool to return shipping rates based on the shipping address.

By: Rick Whittington

Rick Whittington — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 17:53:53 +0000

Soeren,

I’d respectfully disagree that there’s absolutely no value in knowing an average conversion rate. My point was that there are better questions to ask…

I agree with you that PPC and SEO efforts can get in the way of conversion, however. I had a prospective client contact me with a 0.15% conversion rate because the company optimizes their site for words that aren’t likely to cause conversion. Point well taken.

I’m also in agreement that conversion rate per marketing channel is a great measure — and this can be measured through the Ecommerce section of Google Analytics.

By: Soeren Sprogoe

Soeren Sprogoe — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 10:30:30 +0000

This is a very good question.

And I usually answer it with: “There is absolutely no value in an average conversion rate!”

CR’s are very, very different (IMHO) even within industries, as they rely very much on the type of traffic you bring in through which marketing channel.

Usually PPC traffic has a far higher CR than fx. SEO traffic. And thus a rubish site with absolutely no SEO done to it will “outperform” a good, SEO’d site if you look at conversion rate only.

But since SEO usually is far cheaper in the long run than PPC, the cost per conversion is lower for the SEO site.

So in short: You really can’t compare sites on an average conversion rate, and you shouldn’t. But divide it into CR per marketing channel, and you’re getting close to something comparable. But I bet none would publish that kind of information