This comprehensive guide will teach you how to calculate ecommerce conversion rates, break down the different types of ecommerce conversion rates, explain why conversion rates matter, and provide proven tips to improve your ecommerce conversion rates. With the right approach to calculating and optimizing conversion rates, you can increase sales and revenue for your online store.
How To Calculate Overall Conversion Rate
Your overall ecommerce conversion rate looks at your website or store as a whole. To calculate it, you need to:
- Decide on a time frame to analyze. This is often monthly, quarterly, or annually. Shorter periods can also be used to assess the impact of specific changes and campaigns.
- Identify your crucial conversion point(s). For most stores, this will be customer purchases, but it could also include actions like newsletter sign-ups, account creations, or customer service contact.
- Determine the total number of conversions within your chosen time frame. Use the best ecommerce platform, analytics software, or other tools to pull this data.
- Identify the total number of visitors to your store over the same period. Your website analytics likely tracks this.
- Divide the total conversions by the total visitors.
- Multiply the result by 100 to convert it to a percentage.
For example, if you had 1,000 purchases last month out of 50,000 website visitors, your calculation would be:
1,000 (purchases) / 50,000 (visitors) = 0.02
0.02 x 100 = 2% conversion rate
So, for this example, the overall conversion rate is 2%.
Tracking your conversion rate over time shows whether your efforts to optimize conversions are working. You can break it down further, such as by product, traffic source, and landing page, to get additional insights.
Key Types of Ecommerce Conversion Rates
In addition to the overall conversion rate, examining other types of conversion rates can help identify strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities in your customer journey.
The main types of ecommerce conversion rates to track include:
- Product-Level Conversion Rate: The percentage of product page visitors who add the product to their cart or purchase it. This helps determine which products convert best.
- Category Conversion Rate: Conversion rate for a product category page. Helpful in optimizing specific categories.
- Landing Page Conversion Rate: This is the conversion rate for key landing pages, such as home, product category, and product pages. It helps improve pages with low conversions.
- Micro-Conversion Rate: Rates for more minor actions, such as signing up for an account, subscribing to a newsletter, or contacting customer service, can provide insights into the top and bottom of the funnel.
- Device Conversion Rate: Conversion rates are broken down by device type, such as mobile vs. desktop. This is essential for optimizing mobile.
- Traffic Source Conversion Rate: Conversion rates for different traffic sources like search, social, email, and more. Identify the best sources to focus on.
- Campaign Conversion Rate: For individual marketing campaigns like email, PPC, or social media, determine the best campaigns to invest in.
Analyzing conversion rates at these different levels enables you to pinpoint the highest-impact areas for optimization. You can calculate them using the same formula: dividing conversions by visitors and multiplying by 100.
Why Ecommerce Conversion Rate Matters
There are several essential reasons why the ecommerce conversion rate is a crucial metric to track for any online business:
- Identifies Sales Opportunities: Conversion rate reveals areas for improvement in your funnel, helping you focus efforts on changes that are most likely to increase sales. Even minor improvements can add up.
- Measures ROI of Efforts: You can use conversion rate to quantify the ROI of initiatives like marketing campaigns, web design changes, customer service improvements, and more.
- Benchmarks Performance: The conversion rate provides a benchmark to measure your store’s health over time. Sudden changes may indicate issues that need attention.
- Drives More Revenue: Since higher conversion directly leads to more sales, it is a crucial lever for increasing revenue. A 1% gain in conversion could significantly impact the bottom line.
- Signals Customer Experience: Conversion rate offers insights into how customers flow through your site and where they may encounter friction, giving clues on how to improve the experience.
- Helps Set Goals: Establishing conversion rate goals gives your team something specific to work towards. Goals can drive motivation and focus efforts.
- Identifies Trends: Looking at conversion trends over time helps account for seasonal variability while spotting positive or negative momentum.
Tips to Improve Your Ecommerce Conversion Rates
Once you know your current conversion rates and have identified areas for improvement, there are a variety of strategies and best practices you can implement to increase conversions:
Optimize Site Speed
Faster load times have been proven to improve conversion rates. Use speed optimization tools and services to speed up your site.
Streamline Checkout Process
Remove unnecessary steps or fields in your checkout process so customers can complete purchases faster. Consider adding guest checkout.
Make Mobile Friendly
With most traffic now on mobile, ensure your site is mobile-optimized. Check out on mobile to identify issues.
Improve Product Pages
Include high-quality images, detailed descriptions, specs, user reviews, and other elements that build trust and value.
Retarget Website Visitors
Remind visitors of items they viewed or had in their cart with retargeting ads and emails after they’ve left your site.
Reduce Barriers to Purchase
Don’t require customers to create accounts or provide unnecessary information when checking out.
Highlight Security and Trust Symbols
Display security badges, trust seals, and policies prominently to reassure customers.
Offer Free Shipping or Returns
Encourage purchases by offering free shipping over specific order values or easy, free returns.
Send Abandoned Cart Emails
Email people who left items in their cart without buying to bring them back to complete the purchase.
Make Calls-to-Action Clear
Ensure your desired conversion goals, such as “Add to Cart” and “Complete Purchase,” have clear, consistent, and prominent calls to action.
Test, Test, Test
Run A/B tests on elements such as page layouts, offers, content, images, and more to see which optimizations increase conversion rates.
Listen to Customer Feedback
Solicit feedback through surveys and reviews. Complaints about checkout or confusing product details could be hurting conversions.
Review Analytics Data
Look for patterns in your analytics on best-converting traffic sources, pages, times of day, products, customer segments, and other factors.
Fix Common On-Site Issues
Broken links, error pages, outdated product info, and other issues can undermine conversions. Monitor for problems.
Offer Customer Loyalty Programs
Encourage repeat purchases with loyalty programs that offer rewards, points, or discounts for buying.
No single solution guarantees improved conversion rates. The key is to continually test changes using data from your analytics, heat mapping tools, A/B testing software, and other sources to see what works with your customers and site. Even minor fixes can yield significant gains.
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Tools To Calculate and Track Conversion Rates
To effectively monitor and manage your ecommerce conversion rates, leverage tools like:
- Google Analytics: Provides robust ecommerce tracking and reporting on your conversion rates and funnel. Free to use.
- Heap Analytics: Tracks user behavior on your site to produce conversion funnels and data. Offers free plan.
- Piwik PRO: Open source analytics with ecommerce functionality and custom conversion goals. Self-hosted option.
- Adobe Analytics: Part of Adobe Experience Cloud. Adds advanced analysis and segmentation capabilities.
- Mixpanel: Specialized product analytics focused on conversion funnel and user retention analysis.
- Optimizely: Enables A/B testing to find improvements that raise conversion rates. Integrates with other tools.
- Hotjar: Creates heatmaps and recordings of user sessions to understand behavior. It has a free basic plan.
- Lucky Orange: Combination of analytics, heatmaps, and session recordings. Starts with a free lite package.
The right tools provide the data you need to understand your conversion bottlenecks and optimize your site for better performance as with any metrics, the key is consistently tracking conversion rates over time, testing changes, and taking action based on the insights the data gives you into the customer experience and journey on your site.
Conclusion on Calculate Ecommerce Conversion Rate
Calculating ecommerce conversion rate is critical for improving sales results and return on investment from your store. When you calculate ecommerce conversion rate, you gain valuable insights into your store’s performance and can identify areas that need optimization.
By following the steps in this guide, you can accurately measure your current conversion rates, analyze them to identify high-impact areas for optimization, and test changes using proven best practices to increase conversions.
While boosting conversion takes work, the additional revenue and sales generated make it one of the most valuable activities for any ecommerce business. Use the guidance in this article to start driving more conversions and sales on your online store.
