Digital marketing conversion rate: an essential KPI

The digital marketing conversion rate is a key performance indicator for any business. It enables you to gauge how well your digital strategies are working and whether they’re delivering real results. A strong conversion rate is a sign of healthy ROI and underpins brand success. To analyse your conversion rate and pinpoint the strengths and weaknesses of your website, tools such as Incremys and Google Analytics are invaluable.

What is digital marketing?

Digital marketing offers businesses of all sizes a powerful way to reach their target audience and generate quality leads at a lower cost than traditional advertising like TV, radio or print. By using SEO (organic search), SEM (paid advertising) and SMM (social media marketing), you can build a strategy that draws potential customers to your brand. Publishing web content, such as blogs, is a cost-effective way to attract attention without a hefty budget. Digital campaigns can be tracked and optimised in real time with analytics tools like Google Analytics. Ultimately, digital marketing allows smaller businesses to compete with major brands by boosting the visibility of their products or services, both locally and internationally.

What does conversion rate mean in digital marketing?

The digital marketing conversion rate is the proportion of visitors who complete a desired action on your website (known as a conversion) compared to the total number of visitors. For an online shop, a conversion is usually a sale. However, objectives vary depending on your business. A conversion could be watching a video, joining your brand’s social media community, downloading a document or signing up to a newsletter.

How is conversion rate measured?

How do you work out conversion rate in digital marketing? Here’s a practical example: your online shop sells an ebook about SEO. In January, you make 15 sales from 500 visits. Your conversion rate is (15/500) = 0.03. To express this as a percentage, simply multiply by 100 (3%).

What is considered a good conversion rate?

The first benchmark is the average conversion rate across all industries, which, according to a 2022 study, is 2.35%. While this figure is a useful reference, it should be treated with caution: conversion rates vary widely between sectors, sometimes by a factor of three or more. For example, a 5% conversion rate is excellent in sports equipment but disappointing in the automotive industry. What counts as a "good" conversion rate depends on your sector and your goals.

Conversion rate isn’t the only factor affecting revenue

If your site has a 3% conversion rate from 1,000 visits and an average basket of £100, your revenue is £3,000. A competitor with a 2% conversion rate from 1,200 visits and an average basket of £160 achieves £3,840 in revenue. Despite a lower conversion rate, their turnover is higher. It’s a vital metric, but it needs to be considered alongside other factors.

SEO and SEA: two distinct channels

When analysing your site’s conversion rate, it’s essential to distinguish between organic search and SEA (paid advertising). The SEO conversion rate only takes into account organic traffic from search engines. The SEA conversion rate, on the other hand, relates to visitors who arrive via adverts.

SEO and CRO: driving better results

As a key metric for evaluating promotional content, conversion rate is also invaluable for improving your SEO strategies. Simple changes, such as optimising meta descriptions, can have a significant impact on page conversions. Conversion rate optimisation (CRO) is therefore a best practice to combine with SEO.

What influences conversion rate?

Many different factors affect the digital marketing conversion rate:

• The quality of your website content is crucial for achieving commercial goals, as it determines whether your target audience is interested in what you offer. To support businesses, Incremys provides a powerful content production module to boost editorial relevance and increase your digital marketing conversion rate.
• Optimising user experience (UX) is another key factor in making the purchase process easy for visitors. Navigation, usability and design should all be seamless.
• Technically, page loading speed is vital: slow-loading content puts users off and they’re likely to leave. Google also penalises slow sites.
• Offering secure payment options on your website and mobile apps is important to maximise conversions across all platforms.
• Finally, the relevance of your advertising is key, as your ads must match what your potential customers are looking for. Incremys offers a personalised AI to refine ad targeting and performance, as well as a dedicated reporting module to monitor and analyse your digital marketing conversion rate continuously.

Conclusion

The digital marketing conversion rate is a vital metric for brands wanting to assess the impact of their campaigns and promotional content. To improve this ratio, it’s important to use a robust methodology, the right analytics tools and provide users with a positive experience. Remember, conversion rate is a nuanced figure that should be analysed carefully to identify the strengths and weaknesses of your strategy.

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