Website Conversion Rates: KPI data and marketing examples from 17 B2B and B2C marketers

This article was published in the MarketingSherpa email newsletter.

Website conversion rates are kind of like salaries. Everyone wants to know what everyone else is getting. But we’re all a little afraid to ask, and way too shy to share.

So, what do we do? We check out the vaunted industry averages. Helpful as a general ballpark, yes, but they only help to a point.

After all, MarketingSherpa has published that data for many years, so I know the types of questions marketers and entrepreneurs ask when they read it – how did these brands define conversion? What exactly were they trying to get people to do? How were potential customers getting to these websites? How qualified was the traffic?

And the real subtext – my conversion rates are worse (or better) than these. Is that because my website is more optimized for conversion or just because my product or acquisition strategy is different?

In truth, averages are an aggregate. A composite look. Often encompassing many answers to the above question. So, in this article, we bring you specific examples of websites across many industries and locations.

A hearty thanks to the marketers and entrepreneurs we feature in this article – they put it all out there so you can see not just general averages, but how specific websites in different industries are performing and what factors affect those conversion rates.

But before we jump into the data, if you are reading an article on website conversion rates, what you probably really want to know is how to increase your conversion rates.

To help you do that, here is Session #3 from MECLABS new conversion rate optimization course – The Marketer’s Self Image: Three distorted concepts that are robbing your conversion results (MECLABS Institute is the parent organization of MarketingSherpa, and is fully underwriting the course so there is no cost to participate).

Now let’s get to the granular data about specific website performance.

B2B (BUSINESS-TO-BUSINESS)

Software

Company: Castos

Marketer: Craig Hewitt, Founder & CEO

Industry: SaaS (Software-as-a-Service)

Website Conversion Rate: Website conversion rate is 5.1%, which is above our industry average of 3% (for SaaS).

How We Define Website Conversion: Percent of visitors who sign up for a free trial.

Factors That Impact Our Conversion Rate: Relevancy of traffic, UX (user experience) design, home page copy, and call to action.

Countries We Operate In: USA (United States of America)

Advice To Other Marketers About Website Conversion Rates: We have many competitors in our industry and many of our website visitors will be currently using one of our competitors.

To address this, we have created several resource pages setting out how we compare to each of our competitors and why prospective customers might want to switch to us.

We link to these resource pages at the foot of our home page. These resource pages are the highest-converting pages on our website, converting at 12.7% on average.

So, my advice to marketers and entrepreneurs is to make your case as to why you’re better than each of your competitors.

Creative Sample #1: Example competitor alternative resource webpage

Company: Better Proposals

Marketer: Mile Zivkovic, Head of Content

Industry: SaaS

Website Conversion Rate: Around 2%

How We Define Website Conversion: By the percentage of visitors to free users and by free-to-paid users

Countries We Operate In: Operate in England with employees and customers across the world

Advice To Other Marketers About Website Conversion Rates: Limit your free trials. Make them just long enough for the potential client to try out all the features and understand how your service works. Trials that are too long don’t convert as many clients as shorter ones do.

Content

Company: Fit Small Business

Marketer: Salvatore Martorano, Strategic Partnership Manager

Industry: B2B educational publisher

Website Conversion Rate: For articles with strong purchase intent such as Buyer’s Guides, we see conversions – clickthrough rate percent (CTR%) – around 61%. For articles with less purchase intent and more focused on step-by-step and how-to queries, we see CTR% in the 2-4% range.

How We Define Website Conversion: Percentage of inbound visitors that click on outbound links (CTR%). Our website traffic is primarily organic SEO (search engine optimization), so we can assume a lot about our readers based on the KWs (keywords) they search to find us.

We know what they are looking for, and how urgent they are looking to move on any guidance we can provide them. The stronger the purchase intent of those KWs, the higher the CTR%.

Factors That Impact Our Conversion Rate: As a B2B educational publisher, one metric of conversion is how often readers take our advice and click on an outbound link from our content. We write articles ranging from individual product reviews to Buyer’s Guides listing top providers in each topic to step-by-step “how to” guides.

Countries We Operate In: A USA-based B2B educational publisher with content covering dozens of B2B topics, from Point of Sale to Payroll to VoIP (voice over internet protocol) and CRM (customer relationship management). Our content is read by English-speaking countries all over the world, with USA, CA (Canada), UK (United Kingdom) making up ~85%.

Advice To Other Marketers About Website Conversion Rates: Know what your reader is looking for and how urgent they’re looking to act. From that, you can create the most relevant content in the best layout that will resonate the most with your readers/customers.

Services

Company: VIP To Go

Marketer: Abe Breuer, CEO and Owner

Industry: Provider of mobile showers and restroom trailers

Website Conversion Rate: 3%

How We Define Website Conversion: The number of people who stay on the website and add the service to their carts

Factors That Impact Our Conversion Rate: For my particular brand of service offered by VIP To Go i.e. renting restroom services, the elements that contribute to the conversion rate are the urgency of the service required, the cost of utilizing the service, the clarity of the customer journey steps on the website, and the device that the customer is accessing the website from.

Countries We Operate In: USA (based in New York)

Advice To Other Marketers About Website Conversion Rates: Communicate and build trust instantly – include testimonials, reviews, clients, and partners’ information on the main page of your website so it is the first thing your customer comes across. This will help assure your customers of the reliability and quality of your services.

Implement immediate calls to action – have different colors, positions, and buttons in place at various intervals of the journey for your customers to immediately perform an action on the website that will ultimately lead to a purchase.

 

Company: Sydney Digital Agency

Marketer: Farhad Malegam, Founder & CEO

Industry: Web Design & Digital Marketing

Website Conversion Rate: Roughly 7%

How We Define Website Conversion: We measure how many people opted for our “Book an Estimation Call” form. Also measure KPIs such as traffic and country of traffic.

Factors That Impact Our Conversion Rate: Conversion rate is greatly influenced by three factors – relevance, user interface, and website loading speed. We’re providing specific services and started targeting the local area. Hence, we are getting relevant traffic from the targeted location.

Countries We Operate In: Australia

Advice To Other Marketers About Website Conversion Rates: Focus on relevant and LSI (latent semantic indexing) keywords at the beginning. It is important to increase the relevance [to] users.

 

Company: e intelligence

Marketer: Jitesh Keswani, CEO

Industry: Digital marketing and website development services

Website Conversion Rate: Approximately between 4% and 8%. Our raw leads come from filling out our general questionnaire. These are the probable clients who want to optimize their websites with various digital marketing strategies. They show an interest in our company services. Some give their full requirements and details, and some prefer to schedule the call and discuss the objective in detail.

How We Define Website Conversion: For us, qualified leads are the clients who come onboard to optimize their websites with digital marketing and website development services.

Factors That Impact Our Conversion Rate: Our conversion rate gets impacted because of fluctuations in the rankings of our targeting terms. Moreover, any major website changes and not optimizing the website with technical pointers can also impact the conversion rate of the website.

Countries We Operate In: Worldwide

Advice To Other Marketers About Website Conversion Rates: Before putting any CTA (call to action) factors on the website make sure that they are placed correctly, and they are working. Do an in-depth check on regular intervals and confirm that the goal is converting. During the past year of the pandemic, everyone understood more about the importance of the online presence of the business and how the digital marketing industry can evolve in the coming years.

B2C (BUSINESS-TO-CONSUMER)

Goods

Company: Protein Package

Marketer: George Greenhill, Founder & CEO

Industry: Health food

Website Conversion Rate: Protein Package's ecommerce website has an overall lead-to-customer conversion rate of 3.6% based on the past 365 days between October 31^st, 2020, and October 31^st, 2021.

Our MQL-to-customer (marketing-qualified lead) conversion rate is 13.4%.

The Average Order Value (AOV) for the past financial year was £39.55 which is steady year-round.

How We Define Website Conversion: We define a new lead as someone that visits our official website for five seconds or more to avoid bots or crawlers that would skew data.

To define our MQL, we take the total number of website visitors that add one or more items to their basket and then decide to complete a purchase at the checkout.

Factors That Impact Our Conversion Rate: Conversion rates fluctuate throughout the year due to seasonal changes in purchasing patterns. In January, we find that our lead-to-customer conversion rate spikes at 5.7% due to people returning to the gym after Christmas and people starting New Year's resolutions looking to order healthy snacks. The summer period is busy with September to November being our slowest period with conversion dropping to 2.25%, however Black Friday and Christmas offers us a chance to really boost sales volumes towards the end of the year.

Countries We Operate In: We are based in Bridgnorth, United Kingdom but ship our products worldwide. 98% of sales are made directly on our ecommerce website with 2% made in our physical store.

Advice To Other Marketers About Website Conversion Rates: One thing that I'd highly recommend to other entrepreneurs or business owners who are in the online health food space is to focus on your search engine optimization (SEO).

First, this traffic source is completely organic and free once set up. We find website users who arrive via organic search results tend to have a much higher conversion rate – 4.3% – than direct and pay-per-click (PPC) visitors at 2.1%.

The other benefit of SEO is that it generally gets compound growth. The higher you rank and gain domain authority, the more chances you have of ranking for new or related keywords.

 

Company: JettProof

Marketer: Michelle Ebbin, Founder

Industry: Ecommerce clothing brand

Website Conversion Rate: 5.2%

How We Define Website Conversion: Sales conversion rate from purchases through our ecommerce site

Factors That Impact Our Conversion Rate: That’s a 30% improvement from our pre-pandemic conversion rate after optimizing our ecommerce site and maximizing the use of our Facebook and Instagram platforms.

Specifically, we added a product review slider below the fold of our home page and improved the features of our chatbot by indicating an avatar of actual customer service representatives they can speak with.

Likewise, we doubled our efforts to engage with social media followers. We regularly upload about two social media posts a day and interact with experts in our industry.

Countries We Operate In: Our headquarters is in New South Wales, Australia, and we run offices in the United Kingdom and Canada.

Advice To Other Marketers About Website Conversion Rates: Adopt an omnichannel marketing strategy and actively use digital platforms. This way, you can drive significant traffic to your ecommerce site to improve conversion.

Real estate

Company: Excellence Property

Marketer: Jordan McSweeney, Marketing Manager

Industry: Property management and real estate sales

Website Conversion Rate: 49.3%. During the current quarter, we've had 1,004 people visit our website. 354 of them gave us a call, 137 requested directions and 4 sent us a message. That's 495 in total, which is a website conversion rate of 49.3%.

How We Define Website Conversion: The percentage of website visitors that either call us, message us or request directions to our office

Factors That Impact Our Conversion Rate: Like I said, I define website conversion as the percentage of website visitors that either call us, message us or request directions to our office. Because we work in property management, we receive a LOT of calls and walk-ins from people wanting to talk about things like maintenance, applications and arrears. The majority of these callers and walk-ins get our number and our address from the information on our website, hence the high conversion rate.

If you changed our definition of website conversion from “the percentage of website visitors that either call us, message us or request directions to our office” to “the percentage of website visitors that ask us to manage or sell their property” – during this final quarter of the year, we’ve had 1,200 website visitors, 25 of those asked if we could sell or manage their property, which means a current conversion rate of 2.083%. This is a less shocking number.

Countries We Operate In: Townsville, Australia

Advice To Other Marketers About Website Conversion Rates: For other marketers and entrepreneurs to achieve similar results, I would recommend a website that’s less about reading and more about action. For example, on the Excellence Property website, we have a newsletter sign-up button, a “switch to us” button, a “request a call” button, a client portal login and a “contact us” form.

However, reading is still a very important component. Without something to read, visitors would have too many actions to look at and no reason to buy from you. Spend a little time showing people what you stand for by strengthening your value propositions. By doing so, visitors are more likely to flock to your sign-up and purchase options. In the end, the best way to increase your conversion rate is by striking the right balance. The sooner you do, the more you'll convert.

Services

Company: See The Sights Tours

Marketer: Mike Cornell, Business Owner

Industry: Tourism, focusing on walking tours in London with a combination of pay-what-you-like walking tours and pre-paid tours.

Website Conversion Rate: Starting in early 2021 as the UK came out of a Covid lockdown we were around 1-2% as there was very few people travelling. During summer with an increase in domestic holidays in particular, our conversion maximum was 24%. As we move into winter and with the uncertainty being brought about by Covid (not to mention the colder weather that doesn’t always appeal when thinking about doing walking tours) we are anticipating in the region of 7%-10%.

How We Define Website Conversion: Simply the number of people who go from being visitors to booking a tour. With so much competition and variation of tours in our industry, there are many options for consumers to choose from so for us it’s simply a case of optimizing SEO, enhancing our standing in the industry and, measuring the conversions from there.

Factors That Impact Our Conversion Rate: We utilize organic search with Google/Bing SEO but also measure based on bookings received via recommendations from external sources – e.g., Tripadvisor.

Unsurprisingly our pay-what-you-like tours (or free tours) tend to receive the most bookings. This form of tourism is exploding and, with the cost of living expanding in many places around the world, it’s no surprise that people are looking for free tours in London.

We have been surprised at the higher number of people than expected who booked our pre-paid tours via the website although this may be due to some changes and enhanced SEO strategies that we employed as the year went on. It’s worth noting that those booking in advance (two weeks or more) tend to book via computer whilst those booking last minute are using mobile devices.

Countries We Operate In: United Kingdom (UK)

Advice To Other Marketers About Website Conversion Rates: Google Keyword Planner is fantastic however your Google Search Console reports can provide even better feedback into the performance of your website, what you are doing well, and any changes you need to make particularly in relation to keywords.

 

Company: Music Lessons Academy

Marketer: Kayla Caruso, Founder & Managing Director

Industry: Music education

Website Conversion Rate: An average of 10%. On our Google Ads, we see an average click-through rate of 6%

How We Define Website Conversion: How many leads we receive through our website (i.e., how many people fill out our call back form.)

Countries We Operate In: Australia, UK, New Zealand, USA

Advice To Other Marketers About Website Conversion Rates: Generic, but people often forget – market to serve your ideal customer. Everything written on your website should be providing the solution your customer is looking for, not written all about yourself and your business.

 

Company: emlovz

Marketer: Thomas Anthony, Co-Founder

Industry: Dating

Website Conversion Rate: 1.58%

How We Define Website Conversion: Any website visitors who navigate to our enrollment page, checkout page, and order received page.

Factors That Impact Our Conversion Rate: We only focus on inbound content marketing – our site sees ~300,000 website visitors per month from Google Search. The visitor searches for their pain-point on Google, lands on our articles, and we use custom calls to action (CTAs) and sales copy to get them to navigate to our sales page. Even though our clickthrough rate (CTR) is low, our coaching program is $3,000 to $7,000, so it’s worth it to us.

Countries We Operate In: The other co-founder (Emyli Lovz) and I are based in San Francisco, but we have independent contractors working for us in the United States, Mexico, and the Philippines. Our blog reaches readers worldwide, however most traffic is USA-based.

Advice To Other Marketers About Website Conversion Rates: Always, always, always keep testing CTA copy and images. We recently updated our CTA to include a floating PNG image of our co-founder and have been tweaking and adjusting the text copy every two weeks to find the best CTR. Here’s an example of our new CTA.

Creative Sample #2: Floating image CTA

Healthcare

Company: Pacific Heights Plastic Surgery

Marketer: Jonathan Kaplan, MD, MPH, Board Certified Plastic Surgeon

Industry: Cosmetic surgery, but we have other doctors that do this for insurance-based pricing and give visitors to their website the out-of-pocket cost specific to their insurance plan and amount paid towards their deductible, out-of-pocket maximum and co-insurance.

Website Conversion Rate: We have a price estimator that consumers use to check pricing, but only after they enter their contact info. 87% of users that start the process of checking pricing, continue even after they realize they have to enter contact info. Therefore, 13% stop when they see the contact info “paywall.” Of the users that enter contact info, 17.8% come in for a consultation and 62% book. Patients that are price aware at the time of the consultation are 41% more likely to book than price unaware consultations.

How We Define Website Conversion: Visitors who enter their contact info

Factors That Impact Our Conversion Rate: We use a “Get A Quote Now” button as our call to action. There's also a pricing chatbot on the homepage. Either way, pricing is the most tantalizing call to action that has the highest rate of converting visitors into a name, email address and phone number.

Countries We Operate In: US and Canada

Advice To Other Marketers About Website Conversion Rates: The call to action must be 1) a tantalizing call to action, 2) easy to use, 3) instant response with information requested. These are the ingredients for increasing web conversion rates.

Creative Sample #3: Price estimator for plastic surgeon

Content

Company: Ball Are Life

Marketer: Steven Duncan, Chief Editor

Industry: Discuss sports, outdoor lifestyles, mental and relationship health, and healthy living

Website Conversion Rate: 3.78%

How We Define Website Conversion: A visitor to the site who completes a purchase

Factors That Impact Our Conversion Rate: Our products consist of lifestyle, sport, and healthy-living products. Although average product costs stand at under $25, the bulk of our traffic comes from organic sources, mainly Google. However, most visitors to our site come for informational content and are not specifically looking to make a purchase. In addition, nearly 75% of our traffic comes from mobile sources and users visiting for specific information.

Countries We Operate In: We operate from the United States, however, we can provide shipping and order fulfillment across the globe.

Advice To Other Marketers About Website Conversion Rates: Be natural in your approach. Too often we see competitor sites pushing their products to the detriment of the end-user. We don't take that approach. Rather, we attempt to naturally build our internal product recommendations via long-form content, adequately describing the product and its benefit.

In addition, we are completely upfront and transparent on our products and the recommendations we make. We want our users to benefit from our products. And while we are still working to increase our conversion rate, we have an extremely healthy percent of returning users who are looking to purchase additional products.

By being upfront, transparent, and honest, we have found that our visitors are more likely to return for additional purchases once the initial purchase has been made.

 

Company: CricBlog

Marketer: Charbel Coorey, Founder

Industry: Sports, specifically sports blogging tips

Website Conversion Rate: 15.69%

How We Define Website Conversion: Percentage of landing page visitors who download an e-book

Countries We Operate In: Australia

Advice To Other Marketers About Website Conversion Rates: Never be afraid to test different traffic sources to your landing pages to see what works best. Does social work better than SEM (search engine marketing) advertising? If so, which channel(s)? Facebook? LinkedIn? Conversion rates can vary between sources so be sure to test and compare which sources are driving the best results

Your website and landing pages must be straight to the point and give the user a clear call to action. Be sure to make it clear what you want your audience to do (i.e., provide email to download content, contact us) and provide a few quick reasons as to why they should act.

 

Company: Online Solitaire

Marketer: Holger Sindbaek, Founder

Industry: Online gaming

Website Conversion Rate: 32%

How We Define Website Conversion: I have a solitaire website, so my conversion rate is measured by how many people start playing a game of solitaire

Factors That Impact Our Conversion Rate: My main traffic source is Google and 63% are coming from desktop, with the remaining coming from mobile. 59% of the desktop users are using Windows, while 30% are on Mac and the remaining are Chrome OS and Linux.

Countries We Operate In: Operate in the whole world, but most of my users are from North American and Europe.

Advice To Other Marketers About Website Conversion Rates: Don’t underestimate the importance of website conversions. The success of any web business is predicated on two things: traffic and conversions. You might be lucky that you’re getting a lot of traffic from Google or other sources, but if none of that traffic converts, it really doesn’t matter.

So, the two things you should always be looking to improve are: getting more traffic to your website and improving the conversion rate for that incoming traffic.

 

Company: Casino Sites Online

Marketer: Mark Good, Founder

Industry: Online casino affiliate

Website Conversion Rate: 26.5%. This is a blended average that includes high purchase intent visitors from SEO (search engine optimization) plus lower-converting traffic from social media.

How We Define Website Conversion: The percentage of visitors that click-through to one of our listed online casinos.

Factors That Impact Our Conversion Rate: As an affiliate business, we generate revenue when our users clickthrough and transact at another online business. To maximize our revenue, we have to get as many of our website visitors to click through and we need to get them primed so they are ready to transact.

When we acquire visitors on commercial search terms such as “best casino sites” they convert more often and with greater average revenue per user, than visitors from informational search terms like “are online casinos safe.”

Countries We Operate In: United Kingdom

Advice To Other Marketers About Website Conversion Rates: Measure and test everything. Even seemingly small changes to copywriting, colors or placement of call-to-actions can have a big impact on conversion rate and with so many free Google tools like Analytics, Tag Manager and Optimize, plus free versions of tools like Hotjar – you really can understand and optimize every element of your website.

Featured Resources

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