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.
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.
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.
Live demo
See it on real data. The live demo is a fully populated dashboard on demo traffic, with no signup and no card.
Open the live demoCompared
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.
FAQ
Should conversion rate use sessions or visitors?
Sessions for advertising and landing-page comparisons, visitors for product and growth reporting. The important part is picking one, writing it into the metric definition, and never switching it mid-period, because the two typically differ by 30% to 50%.
What is a good conversion rate?
It depends on the goal and the channel far more than on the industry. Ecommerce purchases commonly sit between 1% and 4%, SaaS trial signups between 2% and 8%. Your own trend and your per-step funnel rates are more useful than any cross-industry benchmark.
Why is my conversion rate different in mrkr and in my payment provider?
Usually the denominator or the window. Payment providers count checkout sessions they saw; analytics counts site sessions, including everyone who never reached checkout. Adblockers and bot filtering shift the numbers too. Compare the conversion counts first, then the denominators.
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