What is conversion rate?
Conversion rate is completed goals divided by opportunities. The formula, why the denominator you pick changes everything, and benchmarks by channel.
What is conversion rate?
Conversion rate is the share of visits or visitors that completed a defined goal, such as a signup, a purchase or a demo request. It is calculated by dividing conversions by the number of opportunities in the same period. The denominator you choose, sessions or unique visitors, changes the result substantially.
The formula.
Conversion rate = (conversions / opportunities) x 100
- conversions
- Completed goal events in the period. Deduplicate if one visitor can convert twice.
- opportunities
- Sessions, unique visitors, or people who reached a specific step. State which one, because the three give different answers.
Session-based conversion rate is always lower than visitor-based, because one visitor often takes several sessions to convert. Neither is wrong; mixing them in one report is.
A worked example.
A SaaS signup goal over 30 days.
| Sessions | 18,400 |
|---|---|
| Unique visitors | 11,900 |
| Signups | 412 |
| Session-based | 412 / 18,400 |
| Visitor-based | 412 / 11,900 |
2.2% per session, or 3.5% per visitor
The same 412 signups produce two defensible numbers 1.3 points apart. Pick one, write it into the metric definition, and never switch mid-quarter.
The denominator is the whole argument
Almost every disagreement about conversion rate is a disagreement about what is being divided, not about the count of conversions.
- Per session: the standard for advertising and landing page tests. Conservative, because a visitor who returns three times before buying counts three times in the denominator.
- Per unique visitor: the standard for product and growth reporting. Higher, and closer to how people actually think about it.
- Per step reached: the only fair way to judge a deep funnel step. Checkout completion should be measured against people who reached checkout, not against all site traffic.
In a cookieless setup, per-visitor rates are scoped to a day, because a cookieless identifier deliberately does not persist across days. If you need a multi-day conversion window attached to one person, that is what cookie mode is for, and it brings a consent requirement with it.
The free conversion rate calculator works the number out either way round and makes the denominator explicit, which is the part that causes most of the arguments.
Conversion rate is a funnel, not a number
A single site-wide conversion rate tells you that something is wrong without telling you where. Broken into steps, the same data names the problem.
A typical shape: 100% reach the pricing page, 34% start checkout, 26% enter payment details, 21% complete. The drop from 34% to 26% is the expensive one, and it is invisible in the 21% headline.
Once you can see the step, the fix is usually specific and small: a required field nobody expected, a shipping cost revealed too late, a validation error that does not say what is wrong.
See it on real data
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Realistic conversion rates by goal
Directional ranges, useful only as a sanity check. A rate two or three times outside the range for your goal type usually means the goal is defined wrongly, not that you are exceptional.
| Goal | Common range | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Ecommerce purchase | 1% to 4% | Highly seasonal and highly channel-dependent |
| SaaS free trial signup | 2% to 8% | Higher on pages reached from branded search |
| Demo or sales contact request | 0.5% to 3% | Lower volume, far higher value per conversion |
| Newsletter signup | 1% to 5% | Jumps sharply with an inline form rather than a footer one |
| Landing page from paid search | 3% to 10% | Intent is pre-qualified by the keyword |
Directional patterns from published industry reporting, not measured Mrkr data. Your own baseline and your own trend are worth more than any of these.
How Mrkr measures conversions
Goals in Mrkr are custom events, optionally carrying a revenue value. That means conversion rate, revenue per session and revenue by source all come from the same event stream, so the marketing number and the finance number cannot quietly disagree.
Because Mrkr keeps the campaign parameters on the session, every conversion carries the source, medium and campaign that brought it in, which is what makes revenue attribution possible without a separate tag manager setup.
Bots are filtered before the rate is computed. That matters more than it sounds: crawler traffic inflates the denominator and never converts, so an unfiltered conversion rate is understated by however much bot traffic you receive.
Before you act on a difference between two conversion rates, check it is real: the A/B test sample size calculator tells you how much traffic a given lift actually needs before the result means anything.
Questions, answered.
Related terms.
- What is conversion funnel?
A conversion funnel is an ordered sequence of steps a visitor takes toward a goal, measured by how many people reach each step.
- What is attribution model?
An attribution model is the rule that decides which marketing touchpoints get credit for a conversion when a customer interacted with several before buying.
- What is session?
A session is one continuous visit to a site: a group of pageviews and events from the same visitor with no long gap between them.
- What is landing page?
In analytics, a landing page is the first page a visitor sees in a session, whatever page that happens to be.
- What is event?
An event is any recorded action beyond loading a page: a button click, a form submitted, a video played, a subscription upgraded.
Where this shows up in Mrkr
- Calculate a conversion rate with the free calculator
Sessions or visitors as the denominator, worked out in the browser.
- Check how much traffic a conversion rate test needs
Sample size for a given baseline and lift, before you run the test.
- Break a conversion rate into steps with Mrkr funnel analysis
See which step loses people instead of guessing from one headline number.
- Tie conversions to the campaigns that produced them with revenue attribution
- Browse the full analytics glossary
Every metric, method and privacy term, defined in one place.
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