User Experience / What is a good eCommerce Conversion Rate

What is a good eCommerce Conversion Rate

Andy Thorne
eCommerce Conversion Rate: What is a Good Conversion Rate and How to Improve Yours

Tracking your ecommerce conversion rate is the best method of monitoring the performance of your marketing.

It highlights how good your digital campaigns are at converting users into customers, and usually, the higher your conversion rate, the better your advertising is.

Carry on reading to find out more about good ecommerce conversion rates, how to calculate the conversion rate for your eCommerce site, and how you can improve it.

What is a good conversion rate for ecommerce?

In its simplest form, the conversion rate is the percentage of visitors to your website that convert or carry out the action you want them to do. A good conversion rate for ecommerce is above 10%, which is a good standard for all industries and company sizes.

Ultimately, it is down to your specific business goals and aims to decide what a successful conversion rate is.

Conversion rate isn’t always making a purchase but could be something else such as:

  • Submitting a form
  • Getting in touch with you via phone call or email
  • Downloading some content
  • Signing up for a subscription or newsletter
  • Using an online chat service

There are many ways users can convert on your website, and these will vary depending on the goals you have for your business.

Generally speaking, the higher your conversion rate, the better as this means more users are converting from the same advertising campaign. As well as improving your conversion rate, this also delivers a higher ROAS.

Ultimately, it is down to your specific business goals and aims to decide what a successful conversion rate is. Conversions are not the same as sales, and whilst a high conversion rate for something like email sign ups is great, the aim of marketing is usually to result in sales.

Whilst conversion rate is a great metric to monitor, it doesn’t give you all the information. A great conversion rate could be damaging to your business if the conversions don’t turn into sales, so it’s also worthwhile to track your ROAS to get a better idea of how well your business is performing.

Calculating Ecommerce Conversion Rate

illustration of a calculator

Calculating your ecommerce rate is pretty straightforward, plus its a worthwhile metric to be aware of.

You can use a simple equation to calculate your ecommerce conversion rate. Simply divide the number of conversions (transactions) in a given time, by the total number of visitors to your site or landing page, and multiply by 100% to give a percentage conversion rate.

Ecommerce Conversion rate = (transactions/total visitors) *100%

For example, if you had 58,932 visitors to your site last month, and 3,720 of those visitors made a transaction, your conversion rate is 6.31% for the given time period.

However, getting the information to calculate this information isn’t necessarily easy to access manually.

Instead, if you set up tracking correctly, advertising platforms such as Google Ads and Facebook Ads, and analytics platforms such as Google Analytics can show you your conversion rate, and you can compare rates between different time periods, or on specific pages of your site in a few clicks.

To find your Ecommerce Conversion Rate, head to Google Analytics > Conversions > E-commerce > Overview.

Underneath Revenue & Conversion Rate, you’ll find your site’s Ecommerce Conversion Rate.

google analytics ecommerce insights

You can see various eCommerce insights in Google Analytics.

Within Google Analytics, you can also filter the date range to find out the Ecommerce Conversion Rate for a given time period. 

google analytics date picker

Select the date you wish to view the data for.

Improving Your Ecommerce Conversion Rate

illustration of improving ecommerce conversion rate

Research, optimise and test elements on your website to improve your ecommerce conversion rate.

Improving your ecommerce conversion rate should be based on research, not guesswork. It’s important to conduct in-depth research before making improvements, as well as testing the improvements afterwards to see which works best.

Research

Firstly, conduct heuristic analysis to establish where your site might be underperforming. We recommend a heuristic analysis as it allows you to view your site from your users perspective and helps you to identify the obstacles they might be facing.

To find out how to conduct a heuristic analysis, check out our blog which outlines the process.

Check the page load speed as this could be contributing to a poor conversion rate. A one-second delay in page load could cause a 7% drop in conversion rate.

User interviews also highlight obstacles that customers face whilst using your site. However, these aren’t so easy to obtain.

For a quick way to get real user feedback, ask your friends or your mum (or dad) to take a look at the site and get a quick opinion.

Once you have sufficient research, you’ll be able to make suggestions of ways to improve your site.

Optimise

The next step in improving your conversion rate is to optimise the pages, products and parts of your site that are underperforming.

This may involve improving the design and layout to make the page easier to navigate and use, or increase page speed to reduce the load time.

Optimising image sizes is a great way to improve page speed.

Test

Now that you’ve optimised your site, start tracking your conversion rate once you’ve made and observe whether or not the conversion rate has improved.

You can use A/B testing to compare the original website with the optimised version to see which version performs better.

If the optimised version is performing better, implement the changes. If not, go back to the drawing board and identify other opportunities for improvement.

Conversion rate is one of the most important metrics to monitor as it shows whether users are completing the actions you want them to.

Identifying underperforming pages and making improvements based on research is a great way to increase your ecommerce conversion rate, and in turn increase sales for your business.