Conversion Rate Optimization Statistics: #’s for Top Sites
Want to know if you’re measuring up to the competition when it comes to conversion rate optimization (CRO)?
CRO measures the percentage of people who take a desired action on your site. In other words, the people who sign up for your email list, purchase a product, or download a recipe.
It’s hard to know whether your CRO is effective if you don’t have numbers to benchmark them against.
We’ve rounded up relevant CRO statistics to make this easy for you. If you meet the numbers listed below, you’re exactly where you should be.
If not, these stats will help point you in the right direction.
CRO Statistics That Help You Determine If You Have a Top Site
1. You’re above average if more than 21% of your new leads turn into customers
A sales win rate is the percentage of leads that turn into a closed sale or customer.
It’s what we all want, right? According to HubSpot’s 2024 Sales Trends Report, the average win rate is 21%. That means 79% of leads who visit your website won’t turn into customers.
The larger deals—think comprehensive services or packages that cost $1,000 or more—tend to have a higher win rate. This is likely because of the relationship-building that takes place throughout the sales process. Plus, the deeper a person gets into these buyer journeys, the more serious they tend to be about purchasing.
If your sales win rate is higher than 21%, you’re doing better than pretty much everyone else. Pat yourself on the back and keep doing what you’re doing. You’ve got this.
If your number is lower, though, don’t stress—work on refining your approach to winning conversions. You can get started with these 13 tips to help you improve your conversion rate.
2. If your website’s conversion rate is around 3%, you’re above the average conversion rate for websites across selected industries, which is just over 2%
If you feel like this number from Statista is shockingly low, well…it is. And it proves just how hard it is to generate conversions. If your website’s conversion rate is around 3%, you’re doing well. Anything at 5% and up keeps you head and shoulders above the competition
So why do so many people visit sites but never convert—even if they like what you’re selling?
A lot of it lies in the shopping cart and checkout process. People abandon their carts mainly because extra costs, like shipping and tax, are too high.
No one wants to add an item to their cart, get to the very end of the checkout process, and then get slapped with shipping and tax costs that increase the price by $15 or more.
You can avoid this late-stage cart abandonment by:
- Offering free shipping—and baking the price of shipping into the listed price of your products, OR
- Showing shipping costs right away by asking users to enter their state or region early on in the checkout process
Even a fix this simple can boost your conversion rate, putting it above that low 2% mark. For more help, check out our list of 20 tips to double your ecommerce conversion rate.
3. You’re outperforming 75% of advertisers if the conversion rate for your landing pages is 5% or above
Across industries, the top 25% of landing pages have a 5.31% conversion rate or higher, according to data from WordStream. The top 10% have conversion rates of 11.45% or higher.
The average landing page conversion rate is around 2.35%. Just a few more percentage points and you’re in the top 25%. That said, the jump to the top 10% is really difficult. But once you get there, you’ll start to see steady, meaningful results.
What do high-performing landing pages do to stand out? Four things:
- Differentiate their offers: Top landing pages show viewers how their product or service is different from what they’d find on competitors’ landing pages. This doesn’t mean bashing the competition or getting overly salesy. It just means highlighting the things your product offers that no one else’s does.
- Add trust signals: Has your product or service earned any badges or accolades from major review aggregators? Have any notable people used and enjoyed the product? Say so! Trust signals like badges and testimonials provide social proof to landing page visitors and make it easier for them to say yes.
- Keep the page clean and simple: Avoid cluttering your landing page with copy, navigation menus, and buttons. Make it clear what the page is for with as few words as possible. Use streamlined, attractive graphics. Place one prominent button as your CTA. The easier it is to instantly grasp what the page is about, the higher the chance a visitor will convert.
- Optimize with A/B tests: The best landing pages split test different versions of their copy, CTA button, and graphics. With A/B tests, you can gather cold, hard data on which iteration of your landing page converts better. Once you have a winner, you can direct all traffic there.
4. What the “best” conversion rate is differs greatly by industry
One of the best ways to benchmark how your conversion rate compares to others?
Compare it to the average conversion rate in your industry.
According to Statista, the highest average conversion rate belongs to the food and beverage industry at 3.7% to 4.07%.
If your conversion rate is 5%, you’re knocking it out of the park.
The beauty and skincare industry nabs the next-highest average with a rate of 3.3%. In this industry, a rate of 4% would mean enjoying more business than everyone else.
General apparel rounds out the top three with a 2.6% conversion rate. An apparel brand with a 3% conversion rate? Pretty much a smashing success.
These industries are where a lot of impulsive buying happens, which is partly the reason for the higher average rate. But they’re also where shoppers find a lot of necessities. Everyone needs to eat, use hair and skin care products, and wear clothes.
The conversion rate is predictably lower in luxury industries. The three lowest-converting industries are:
- Luxury apparel: 0.9%
- Home furniture: 0.8%
- Luxury handbags: 0.4%
For most people, items in these categories are nonessential. People don’t purchase them as often as they do shampoo or casual t-shirts. But many want these luxury items—they just can’t afford them like they can essential purchases. A person might save up for a year before buying a $500 handbag, for instance. Toothpaste and lotion, on the other hand, are monthly purchases for most folks.
Because it takes people longer to pull the plug on luxury purchases, the conversion rate is lower.
When you look at both sides of the list, it’s easy to see how what’s deemed above average depends on the industry. For example, a food and beverage website with an average conversion rate of 4% is above average.
For a luxury handbag website, a conversion rate of 1% is above average.
5. 1-second page load times puts your site in an elite group that achieves up to 3x higher conversion rates than sites with 5-second page loading times
In these modern days, everyone expects lightning-quick page load times.
The lower your load time, the higher your conversion rate, say these stats by Portent:
- B2B sites that take 1 second to load enjoy a conversion rate up to 3x higher than one that loads in 5 seconds.
- B2C sites that load in 1 second enjoy a conversion rate up to 2.5x higher than those that load in 5 seconds.
The longer someone has to wait for a site to load, the less interested they become—and the more likely they are to exit the page before it loads.
The only way to earn a spot in the increased conversion rates club is to keep your page load times to 2 seconds or less. One second is ideal.
This is where a good website designer is worth their weight in gold. Find someone who understands how to keep page loading times low—and who can troubleshoot for you if something goes wrong down the line.
6. If you enable landing page sign-up forms, you’ll be among the 5% using the sign-up form with the highest conversion rate
Most businesses use popups for their sign-up forms, but they have the second-lowest conversion rate at 3%. Only a small percentage of sites use sign-up forms on landing pages. And they’re enjoying a much higher conversion rate than their competitors: 23%.
A lot of people find popups annoying. Jarring, even. They appear at inconvenient times, because let’s face it, is there ever really a good time to have a random promotional window block the text you were reading?
Not really. Web users often exit out of popups so they can get back to what they were reading. If the popups offer discounts on products or services they find valuable, the result might be different. Users might happily hand over an email and phone number for a 15% discount or $10 coupon.
Or they might still be too annoyed with the popup to take any positive actions on your site.
The fix? Create external landing pages for your signup forms instead of popups that appear at the worst times on your site.
And keep this final fact in mind: popups that only ask for an email address and a phone number have the highest signup rate.
7. Marketers that achieve high conversion rates prioritize direct marketing because it has the highest conversion rate of all marketing channels despite the emphasis on social media
Digital marketing may get all the hype, but it’s far from the most effective marketing channel around.
Instead of spending all your marketing time making reels, infographics, and cleverly worded posts, focus on direct marketing efforts.
Direct marketing is a strategy where products and services are directly promoted to your audience. There’s no middle person. Or middle-platform. Instead, direct marketing is done via one-to-one communication through email, phone, text messages, mail, and catalogs.
According to ContentSquare’s 2024 Digital Experience Benchmark Report, direct marketing has the highest conversion rate: 3.13%. Digital marketing lags behind this—especially the social media subfield of digital marketing. Organic social media marketing only enjoys a 1.05% conversion rate. Paid social is even lower, at 0.61%.
This doesn’t mean you should ignore digital marketing altogether. It just means an effective direct marketing strategy should be your main focus. Digital marketing can come second.
Both are important, but too many brands think social media marketing can replace direct marketing, and it just can’t.
8. Sites with high conversion rates optimize the desktop experience as much as the mobile experience—because desktops have a higher conversion rate
This unexpected gem comes to us from ContentSquare’s 2024 Digital Experience Benchmark Report, too.
It’s easy to think that because people spend more time on mobile devices, they make more purchases there.
But the stats tell a different story. According to ContentSquare, desktops have a conversion rate of 4.03%, while mobile devices lag behind at 2.19%. Here’s why: people may spend more time on their mobile devices, but they’re usually there to watch TikTok videos, see their friends’ pictures on Facebook, or browse websites for fun.
They’re not typically there to purchase. Desktops, on the other hand, are easier to shop on. They’re bigger, which means users can see more information than they can on a phone or tablet.
Streamlining your mobile device experience and desktop experiences to accommodate these intents will help boost your conversion rates.
9. The top sites master personalized messaging and can see an increase in conversions of up to 21%
Shoppers liked personalized ads and messaging in 1892 and they like it now. The top sites, according to HubSpot’s 2024 State of Marketing Report, can master personalized messaging to the point where they:
- Increase conversions up to 21%
- See up to 150x higher return on investment (ROI)
- Gain a 50% increase in customer engagement
How can you achieve numbers like these?
Start with personalized SMS communications. And go beyond using the customer’s first name when you communicate with them. Give them personalized product recommendations based on their browsing history. Remind them of their abandoned cart. Notify them of sales that align with their interests.
The more they feel directly spoken to, the more likely they’ll be to feel like you actually want to help them find items they’ll love. Not just push random products at them, billboard style, until they hopefully make a purchase.
10. Sites most effective at getting late-stage leads (people in the evaluation/purchase stage of the buyer’s journey) through content marketing create case studies
Content can still convert. Especially if it’s a case study. According to the Content Marketing Institute’s 2023 Content Marketing for Demand Generation Survey, 40% of marketers said case studies were the most effective type of content for attracting people who are ready to buy. In-person events came in 2nd (28%) and interactive content was third (25%).
Case studies show audiences exactly how a product or service helped a previous customer. It gives them solid quantitative and qualitative data to draw from as they ponder their own decision. It’s the ultimate form of social proof—and we’ve got a guide for how to make your own case studies.
