Google Ads Conversion Rate

What Is a Conversion Rate

The conversion rate measures the percentage of visitors who complete a desired action on your website or landing page.

This action could be anything from making a purchase, filling out a contact form, subscribing to a newsletter, downloading a whitepaper, or any other predefined goal that signifies a successful conversion.

How to Calculate Conversion Rate

To calculate your conversion rate, you first need to determine which actions will actually qualify as conversions. This can be a purchase, sign-up, or something else.

Once you have that information and set a specific time frame for your calculation, you can follow this formula:

Conversion Rate = (Number of Conversions / Total Number of Visitors) * 100

Say you have an online store, and in the last week, you had 5,000 visitors to your website. Out of those, 200 visitors made a purchase.

Let’s use the formula:

Conversion Rate = (200 / 5000) * 100 = 4%

In this example, the conversion rate is 4%. It means that 4% of the visitors completed the desired action, which, in this case, was making a purchase.

What Is a Good Conversion Rate

There’s no universally good conversion rate that can apply to any business. You need to consider factors such as industry, specific business model, and the actual conversion goal that’s being measured.

Other factors include the type of product or service offered, the target audience, and the quality of your marketing strategies.

For example, conversion rates for SaaS companies can vary widely, but a good benchmark might be around 3% to 8%.

Financial service websites, including insurance and banking, might see conversion rates from 2% to 7%.

Conversion rates for educational institutions and e-learning platforms may fall in the range of 3% to 10%.

These are some general figures across different industries, but we also prepared a few useful benchmarks across different platforms that you might find useful. We pulled them directly from our Benchmark Groups product:

• A good goal conversion rate on Google Analytics is from 1.3% to 2%, according to Google Analytics Benchmarks for All Companies.
• A good conversion rate on Google Ads is around 1.2%, according to Google Ads Benchmarks for All Companies.
• A good conversion rate on Microsoft Ads is between 1.5% and 3%, according to Microsoft Advertising Benchmarks for All Businesses.
• A good conversion rate on Google Analytics for ecommerce websites is around 1.2%, according to Google Analytics Benchmarks for Ecommerce.
• A good session conversion rate on Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is 1.8%, according to Google Analytics 4 (GA4) Benchmarks for All Companies.

How to Improve Conversion Rate

Whether you’re an ecommerce store, a B2B service provider, or a content-based website, boosting your conversion rate is probably one of your key objectives.

But depending on which specific action you want to increase conversions on, you’ll need to test and refine a lot of different approaches.

That said, we compiled a few interesting strategies to help you improve your conversion rate, shared by some of the industry experts we talked to over the years:

• Make your intentions clear in the opt-in: It’s only natural for marketers to assume that someone who opted-in on a page and provided their email is okay with being marketed to with future emails. But that’s not always a given for people outside of the industry. Instead of putting that in fine print that’s easily missed, make your intentions clear that you want to send them emails in the future and that they’re okay with that. Disinterested users who unsubscribe immediately after receiving a few of your emails not only hurt your conversion rate, but also your deliverability.
• Create a great pre-click experience: While prominent CTAs and persuasive copy play a huge role in conversions, so does a great pre-click experience. If you manage to get the prospects warmed up with a great advertorial or an ad leading to the landing page, you can easily boost your landing page conversion rates by at least a few percent.
• Use retargeting to resolve any common uncertainties: Not many businesses use retargeting to address potential customer uncertainties. But if you refine your advertisement and add new copy that resolves the potential uncertainties that are keeping those users from buying, you can get a much bigger boost in conversion rates than by changing the angle or just running the same ad again.
• Inform the prospects that you’re moving on: If you run email campaigns to send customers further down the funnel, a good idea to increase conversions is to inform them that you’re moving on soon. Instead of just assuming that they’re not interested in hearing about that same offer again and cutting it altogether, it’s much better to tell them that you’re not going to send it anymore and that this is the last chance to get in.

More resources to help you improve:

• Which Pages Drive The Most Conversions?
• Improving Website Conversion Rate by 6% (w/ Help Scout)
• Increasing Free Trial to Customer Conversion to 70 Percent (w/ CallRail)
• Are Your Website Conversion Rates Dropping? Try These 20 Tips
• How to Improve the Goal Conversion Rate on Your Website? 8 Expert-Backed Tips