Marketing and audience
Conversion rate calculator
Conversions divided by visitors. The number is easy; knowing which visitors belong in the denominator is not.
Optional. Gives you revenue per visitor, which compares across pages.
Conversion rate
2%
- Revenue per visitor
- $1.58
- Visitors per conversion
- 50
Conversion rate = conversions ÷ visitors
Pick the denominator deliberately
Visitors, sessions and pageviews give three different conversion rates for the same business, and they can differ by a lot. One person visiting four times is one visitor, four sessions and perhaps a dozen pageviews.
Unique visitors is usually the honest choice for a landing page, because it answers how many people decided. Sessions is better for a checkout flow, where the same person genuinely gets several attempts.
Whichever you use, use the same one when you compare two pages. Most conversion rate arguments turn out to be denominator arguments.
Revenue per visitor beats conversion rate
A conversion rate treats every conversion as identical. Revenue per visitor does not, which matters the moment you have more than one price.
A page that converts 2% at $79 is worth more than one converting 4% at $29, and a conversion rate chart would show you the opposite conclusion. If you are testing anything that touches price or plan mix, revenue per visitor is the metric to decide on.
Small numbers lie
At 20 conversions, moving one conversion changes the rate by 5% relative. Two weeks of traffic on a small site can easily produce a difference that looks decisive and is noise.
Before acting on a change, ask how many conversions it rests on. Under a few hundred, the honest answer is usually that you cannot tell yet.
Where conversion rates go wrong
Bot traffic inflates the denominator and depresses the rate. Analytics filtering helps; server logs usually show the scale of it.
Internal traffic does the same. Your own team reloading a pricing page forty times a day is visitors who will never convert.
And a rate that improves while conversions fall is a smaller, better-matched audience rather than a better page. Always read the two numbers together.
Questions
- How do you calculate conversion rate?
- Divide conversions by visitors in the same period and multiply by a hundred. 248 conversions from 12,400 visitors is a 2% conversion rate.
- Should conversion rate use visitors or sessions?
- Unique visitors is usually right for a landing page, because it answers how many people decided. Sessions suits a checkout flow, where the same person genuinely gets several attempts. The two give different numbers, so use the same one when comparing pages.
- What is a good conversion rate?
- It depends on the traffic and the price. A free signup from branded search may convert above 10%, while a paid plan from cold traffic can be well under 1%. Compare against your own trend before any benchmark.
- Why use revenue per visitor instead of conversion rate?
- Because a conversion rate treats every conversion as identical. A page converting 2% at $79 beats one converting 4% at $29, and only revenue per visitor shows that.
- How many conversions do I need before trusting a change?
- More than most people assume. At 20 conversions, one more or fewer moves the rate by 5% relative, so a fortnight of small-site traffic can produce a difference that looks decisive and is noise.