First impressions matter: what’s your lead conversion rate?

Metric Stack 23: Lead Conversion Rate and more!

What do you know about your website visitors? It’s not likely that you know each of them personally. But you can certainly segment them by demographics, acquisition channel, and their behaviour on your website.

One of the most important things you can learn about your website visitors is their affinity towards your product.

Welcome to Metric Stack. I’m Priyaanka Arora, your personal metric assistant and Content Researcher & Writer at Klipfolio. This week, let’s look at a key indicator of effective top-of-the-funnel conversion, Lead Conversion Rate.

What is Lead Conversion Rate?

Lead Conversion Rate, also known as visitor-to-lead conversion rate, is the percentage of visitors to your website that are converted into leads. Here’s the formula:

Lead Conversion Rate = Leads / Visitors

A high Lead Conversion Rate can indicate high-quality web traffic, effective communication, high-value offers, and optimal website experience.

How to calculate Lead Conversion Rate

You calculate Lead Conversion Rate by dividing the number of leads by the total number of visitors to your website in a given time period. But to do this with added insight, you need to first segment your lead capture sources.

Let’s say the possible lead capture mechanisms on your website include a newsletter signup, a trial signup, and a workshop registration. Now let’s look at what happens over the course of one week: say you get 15,000 visitors to your website within that week.

400 people register to attend your workshop, another 50 sign up for your newsletter, and 80 people sign up for a trial of your product. Some quick math tells you your Lead Conversion Rate is (400 + 50 + 80) / 15,000 which is 3.5%.

I’ll take you through some benchmarks in just a minute but let’s think about what these hypothetical numbers tell you.

Your workshop is really popular. How can you be even more certain that this is a great lead capture approach for your business? Observe fluctuations in your Lead Conversion Rate over time (I recommend PowerMetrics to track your metrics for free!).

If you can pinpoint the boost in leads from the time you opened registrations for your workshop, you know you’re onto something. However, if you find that workshop registrations have diverted leads away from trial signups, you may want to reevaluate if and how the two events share screen space.

What’s a good Lead Conversion Rate benchmark?

Studies suggest that the average global website conversion rate is around 2.58%, as of Q2 2019. Take a look at the graph from Invesp’s 2020 study of conversion rates:

It’s fascinating to see how UK website conversion rates are steadily higher than US and global conversion rates. Do note that this graph is specific to e-commerce websites, which are known to have higher conversion rates in general.

How do you improve your Lead Conversion Rate?

Here are the top three most effective ways to improve visitor-to-lead conversion rates on your website:

1. Quality is key. Improve your web traffic quality through targeted ads, clear and concise messaging and content, and search engine optimized landing pages. While it doesn’t exactly hurt to have a high volume of visits to your website from a brand awareness perspective, website visitors relevant to your business are much more likely to move further through your sales funnel.

2. Fix your web traffic behaviour metrics. Did you know that higher average session duration and low bounce rate can be a great indicator of higher conversion? Track these metrics as well as page views per session, and average time on page. Remember, the longer someone is on your website, the more likely they are to convert.

3. Improve your website speed and performance. As stated on MetricHQ, almost 50% of visitors exit a page that takes longer than two seconds to load. Not only does this make a good impression, but also captures attention from being diverted. Two seconds is really all it takes!

These tips are the most common starting point for conversion rate improvements. To get there in the first place, tracking your metrics consistently is key! Always remember that metrics add more value when you act on what the data tells you.

Every stage of the sales funnel is equally important, in my opinion. If you manage to perform well at the very top of the funnel, chances are, you’ll do well further into the customer journey.

Tune in to the Metric Stack Podcast!

Have you ever attended a meeting and thought: “This could have been an email”? Aydin Mirzaee, co-founder and CEO of Fellow is our latest guest on the Metric Stack podcast.

Aydin shares how he built Fellow to be *the* place where teams gather to have productive meetings.

Listen to the episode on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.