Conversion rate

The proportion of people who take the next step. Always specify which step, or the number means nothing.

What it means

A conversion rate is the percentage of people at one stage who reach the next: visitors who enquire, enquiries that become quotes, quotes that become orders.

Every stage has its own rate, and the overall rate is the product of all of them.

Why it matters

Improving conversion is usually cheaper than buying more traffic, and almost always faster. Doubling the enquiry-to-quote rate has the same effect as doubling the marketing budget, at no additional cost.

It is also the diagnostic. A business with plenty of enquiries and few sales has a different problem from one with few enquiries, and the two are frequently confused.

What it looks like in practice

Measure each step separately and find the worst one. That is where the work is.

For a website, the two most common causes of poor conversion are unclear next steps and asking for too much information too early.

Test one thing at a time and give it enough volume to mean something. At twenty enquiries a month, a change that looks like an improvement over two weeks is usually noise.

What to watch out for

Improving a rate by reducing the denominator. Filtering out enquiries raises the conversion rate and can lower total sales.

Averaging across sources. Referrals and paid search convert very differently, and the blended figure hides both.

Where to get proper advice

Your analytics will show the website steps. For sales-stage conversion, this comes from your own pipeline data rather than from any tool.