What’s considered a good conversion rate for marketing?

So, you want to know how your marketing is stacking up against the competition? Or maybe just want to know what is a good conversion rate for you to aim towards? Or perhaps you’re reading this thinking “what the hell is a conversion rate and why should I care?” Either way, you’re in the right place because we’re going to be covering all you need to know about conversion rates so you can start to measure the success of your digital marketing. Get your notepad ready and your pen ink warm because the class is in session…

What is ‘conversion rate’ and why should I care about it?

A conversion rate isn’t nearly as complicated as it sounds – the percentage of users/readers/viewers who complete the desired action (e.g. buy, download, sign-up etc.); Let’s use an example to bring this to life… Assume you’ve run a campaign where you want your audience of 10,000 to click through to watch a video. Out of those 10,000, a total of 3500 clicked the link. Therefore, a conversion rate can be calculated as follows; 350/10000 = 0.035 or a 3.5% conversion rate. Congratulations! You’ve just found your first metric to measure the success of your marketing. Now you might be thinking “OK, this is all well and good but what does this do for my business?” And that’s a very good question, fellow sceptic. To answer that, how about we take another example; Pretend you’ve run two different Facebook Ad campaigns directed to people to directly buy your product. At the end of it, you have made some sales, which is great. But you’re dying to know which of those campaigns performed the best. How are you ever to find out? Enter…Conversion rates. This basic figure can empower you to throw out what doesn’t get results for your business and capitalise on what does. It can help you answer questions like; What media channels should I focus on to grow my company? What type of content does my audience prefer? What kind of visuals work best for engaging my users? Where am I wasting my time and money marketing? …And a lot more. Monitoring your conversion rates allow you to test different concepts and get an objective confirmation as to whether it was a success or not. Once you’ve got an idea of your rates, you can then set targets for improvement and measure them over time. If you’re like most, your next question is likely to be something along the lines of….

What is a good conversion rate and how do I improve mine?

In an ideal world, I would share a single value and that’s where this blog would end. Unfortunately, life isn’t that easy and you should adapt your targets against each of the different channels available. However, what we can do is look at the average conversion rates across a variety of digital marketing methods and some quick tips you can implement today to improve your rates. Now, please note that the figures we’ve shared here are averages across all industries. Each industry may have slight deviations from these averages, but that’ll give you a solid starting point to assess your business against. OK, let’s jump in;

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

Average conversion rate: 2.4% 5 quick-fire tips to increase your conversions search engine optimisation; 1. Use the right keywords to attract the right visitors to your site. For example, using the keyword “Men’s watches” may get you a lot of visitors, but “Men’s watches for sale” will likely get you more sales. 2. Keep your users in your sales funnel. Let’s say we shared an informative blog on a topic around digital marketing. Conversion rates, for example. It may be useful to then mention how our team of experts can handle all your marketing to achieve impression rates and save you the time and effort of doing it yourself. …just as an example, of course (wink, wink). 3. Retarget those who have visited your site but then left without taking any action by showing them ads for your business on other websites. Up to 96% of people don’t take action the first time, so remarketing opens up a huge opportunity for you. 4. Optimise the page experience for your audience by checking that your page loads quickly and ensuring your website is mobile phone optimised. Not having these two up to scratch will turn off Google from promoting your page and have anyone who finds you quickly pressing that little ‘X’ button the moment your page doesn’t load as fast as they expect (which is about 3 seconds, FYI). 5. Keep your audience on your site for longer by adding in a variety of content from blogs to videos. Encouraging people to spend more than two minutes on your page can do wonders for your ranking in Google and it helps accelerate the trust a prospect builds with you. Try suggesting other content on your pages and add in short videos and other visual elements to keep the audience engaged.

Social Media:

Average conversion rate: 1.9% 5 quick-fire tips to increase your conversions in social media; 1. Optimise your landing page to reflect whatever call-to-action you’re promoting on your socials. If you say “click here to buy our product”, be sure that the page takes them directly to that specific product, not just your general home page. 2. Have consistent branding. Social media is the ultimate long game – your audience may follow you for months or years before buying. Make it easy for them to know which posts are coming from you by having the same voice, colours, imagery across everything you do. Constantly “changing things up” will only confuse potential buyers. 3. Make the most of any user-generated content. People trust buying from a company that other people buy from. It’s human nature. Selling jewellery? Use pictures of customers wearing it (with their permission) to promote your product even further. 4. Actually create good content. It seems pretty obvious, but a lot of businesses overlook this. Focus on creating content that speaks to your target audience and use the insights features to further assess what is and isn’t working. 5. Know your platform. Social media is a broad brush, so it’s worth mentioning that each channel deserves its own respect. It’s not as simple as resharing from Facebook to Twitter anymore. Now, this doesn’t mean you should be posting on everything, all at once. My advice is to pick 1-3 that hold the majority of your target audience and stay consistent there.

Pay Per Click (PPC):

Average conversion rate: 3.75% for search and 0.77% for display ads. 5 quick-fire tips to increase your conversions pay per click; 1. Again, optimise your landing page to be specific to the ads by using similar language and content. E.g. if someone clicks on “Book a call with an accountant”, be sure to take them to a booking page rather than your general website. 2. Adjust your targeting. Stop trying to get all women. If most of your customers are women between the ages of 25-40, focus all your efforts there. 3. Segment your audience. Let’s assume you’re selling perfume. You could segment your audience into men and women; the women see an ad highlighting the benefit of wearing this lovely fragrance, whereas the men might receive an ad focusing on “here’s a great gift idea this Valentine’s day”. Both are your customer, but buy for different reasons – let this show in your ads. 4. Test test test. Not sure which colour concept attracts your audience the most? Try doing both in what is called A/B testing. Create two variations of your ad (the only difference being colour here) and show each version to a randomised audience and see which performs better. 5. Remarket those who visited and took some action but didn’t buy. Retargeting them with specific ads can help recover these lost leads and boost your conversions. There you have it. Now you know what is a good conversion rate for your marketing, you can now look at what you’ve been doing with an objective eye. With this knowledge, you’re equipped to capitalise on what’s working and, more importantly, start improving what isn’t. However, if you’re still not sure on what exactly you need to be focusing on to grow your business, click here to enquire about how we can help. Class dismissed.