If you've ever Googled how to measure your website's conversion rate, you've probably run into a version of this formula:
Conversion rate = (Number of conversions ÷ Number of visitors) × 100
Sounds simple enough, right?
Well yes, if you’re running an ecommerce store and one conversion is simply one sale.
For a service-based business, things get a little more complex.
Figuring out WHICH conversions you want to measure
A conversion can be any action you want people to take on your website. That could be:
✅ signing up to your newsletter
✅ downloading your lead magnet
✅ sending an enquiry through your contact form
This is why it’s a bit more complicated for service businesses - we can’t simply use ‘number of sales’ to calculate conversion rate.
In fact, with service businesses, the actual sale (the moment a lead becomes a client) generally happens somewhere outside of the website. It’s after a meeting or a discovery call has been had, a proposal has been sent, and a contract is signed.
For service businesses, the job of website conversions is to get potential clients to take that first step, and the first step can look like lots of different things.
Depending on your current goals, campaigns and strategy, you might decide to focus on different actions at different times, and the 'main' conversion that you're measuring might change.
A strategic approach: track each conversion separately.
This is what I’d recommend for service-based businesses:
Track separate conversion rates for each key goal, for example:
- Newsletter sign-up rate
- Enquiry form submission rate
- Discovery call booking rate
This will help you to track improvements for specific areas over time.
Site-wide vs page-level conversion rates
Using the total number of website visitors in your conversion rate formula is good for tracking overall performance across the whole website.
For example: 15 call bookings from 1000 total visitors = 1.5% site-wide conversion rate for that conversion.
But it’s often useful to measure the conversion rate of a specific page (especially landing pages and sales pages), in which case the site-wide rate will be fairly meaningless.
To see how specific pages are performing, you’ll need to use number of page views in the formula, rather than total number of visitors.
For example: 40 newsletter sign-ups from 100 views of your newsletter landing page means that your landing page has a conversion rate of 40% - pretty good!
💡 Site-wide rates give you the big picture.
💡 Page-level rates help you zoom in and troubleshoot.
I recommend tracking both if you can - they answer different but equally useful questions.
What is a ‘good’ website conversion rate?
I know this is really unhelpful, but… it depends!
As I’ve explained, it depends on what you’re tracking, and how you’re tracking it.
Then it depends on the industry you’re in, and the type of website you have. The conversion rate for an ecommerce site is likely to be much higher than a website for a service business. That’s because people visit ecommerce sites with the intention of buying something on the spot.
If you’re a service business, your website visitors will be browsing, comparing, researching, and making decisions.
For a service business, a site-wide conversion rate for a main conversion (like booking a discovery call) could be 1-2%, and this would be considered pretty good.
That means for every 100 visitors to your site, you’d be getting 1-2 discovery call bookings.
👉 What’s your site-wide rate for your main conversion? If it’s less than 1%, you might have some work to do.
Conversion rate is important when you’re considering how much traffic you need.
If you’re struggling with low conversion rates, more traffic isn’t going to fix the problem. You need to identify the reason you have a low conversion rate, and fix that first.
➡️ Here's a diagnostics guide: 5 areas to check and fix if you have a low conversion rate
If you’re disappointed by a low number of enquiries or bookings, but then you run the numbers and realise that your conversion rate is actually fine, this means that you need to focus on driving more traffic to your website.
➡️ Read my guide: How much website traffic do you actually need?