Websites can be really effective sales engines that generate new leads 24/7, even while you’re sleeping, on vacation, or handling other non-sales tasks. The key to getting high results from your website is to create strong product landing pages with high conversion rates. What counts as a good landing page conversion rate? Read on for a short but detailed breakdown of the factors that impact how potential customers come to your website and how you can encourage them to click on the next action that leads them to becoming an actual lead or customer!
Already know what you’re looking to learn about? Jump to it here:
- The conversion rate formula
- Factors affecting conversion rates
- Tools to calculate conversion rates
- Examples of ideal conversion rates by industry
- How to increase conversions on landing pages
- How to generate higher website traffic
- Other important metrics for your landing page
- Conclusion
The conversion rate formula
Before we jump into the details on what makes a good landing page conversion rate, it’s important to know this simple formula that calculates this ratio.
(Number of visitors / Number of conversions)*100 = Conversion rate percentage (%)
The number of visitors could be something like:
- How many views a certain page received
- How many impressions a specific element on the page received
- How many people saw a paid ad
The actual “conversion” can be anything you deem relevant to your business’ growth, like:
- Purchases of a new course
- Template downloads
- Form fills for more information
- Requests for a personal coaching session
It’s important to remember that conversion rates are always talked about as percentages. The goal is always to make this number as high as possible!
In the next few sections, we’ll walk through some ways to boost your conversion rates on landing pages.
Main factors affecting conversion rates
Understanding how to measure and impact conversion rates will help you determine what a good conversion rate is for your website. Try experimenting with these factors to try and generate higher results.
Traffic and referral sources
Website traffic measures how many people actually came onto your landing page. It’s important to look at stats about unique users rather than the overall traffic, as you may have had some people visit your landing page multiple times in a given time period. By measuring just the unique users, you’ll have a much more accurate calculation of your conversion ratio.
Sources are the places where you get website traffic from. For example:
- Social media platforms that direct to your landing page
- Organic keywords from search engine optimization (SEO) efforts
- Other websites that have your website promoted or hyperlinked on a page
To boost your website traffic, you can boost distribution of your landing page’s link on social media, other sites, paid advertising networks, or SEO. See more on this further down. Keep in mind that increasing the number of visitors to your site without increasing the number of conversions will actually lower your conversion rate.
Calls-to-action
Having an effective call-to-action (CTA) will help people convert through to the desired action once they’ve hit your page. A CTA is usually a short prompt to encourage people to take the next step and it appears as a button or link on your landing page. Some examples of great CTA’s include:
- Book a call
- Share your story
- Tell us more
- Get connected
- Discover the next step
- Create an account
Jump below to learn about how to test which CTA will perform best for your audience.
Website design
Of course, even if you can bring a lot of people to your site and you have clearly posted enough CTAs around the page, you’ll still need the design and information on your landing page to appeal to your target audience. Here’s a list of factors to consider in website design:
- Colours, fonts, and other stylistic decisions
- Use of media like audio, images, and video
- Copywriting that appeals to your audience
- Page load speed (make it as fast as possible!)
- Security of the website
- URL slug size and trustworthiness (best to keep short slugs where possible)
How to calculate your website conversion rate
There are plenty of tools available that will help you measure your conversion ratios. Fortunately, most e-commerce platforms like Thinkific, Shopify, and Square will provide some information about your rates for you. Since they are already hosting your product landing pages and marketplaces, it’s easy for them to automatically calculate your average conversion rates overall and per page.
If you keep your website builder and marketplace or CRM separate from each other, you’ll need to rely on different tools and then calculate the conversion rate manually. Google Analytics is a go-to product for many marketers because of how easily it ties into most websites and how accurate the data is.
Examples of ideal conversion rates by industry
According to Hubspot, the benchmark conversion rate for any landing page is 10%. However, most businesses hit an average of 5.89% on their landing pages.
Your target conversion rate for your landing page will also depend on your goal. Calls-to-action that relate to the top or middle of the sales funnel, like template downloads or self-serve product tours may generate higher conversions than lower sales funnel CTAs like booking a coaching session.
Semrush is an example of a marketing tool that can identify the conversion rates of your competitors. It’s a good practice to keep tabs on how your competitors are doing and what messaging they’re using as it will be the most accurate representation of a good landing page conversion rate for your niche.
Some additional examples of conversion rates goals by niche include:
| Industry/Niche | Average Rate | Median Rate |
| Real Estate | 7.8% | 2.4% |
| Software-as-a-Service | 9.5% | 3.0% |
| Family Support | 9.0% | 3.0% |
| Home Improvement | 7.2% | 3.8% |
| Legal | 14.5% | 5.4% |
| Fitness & Nutrition | 13.2% | 5.6% |
| Finance & Insurance | 15.8% | 6.2% |
6 Ways to boost your conversion rates online
A/B testing
A/B testing is a critical process to continuously optimize your landing page. How it works is by selecting a small detail, such as the colour of the CTA button, the headline, or the location of the form fill area and creating variations of the landing page with this element changed. Then, run all of the versions of the landing page for 2-4 weeks and measure if one page had a higher conversion rate. At the end of the testing period, proceed with the highest performing option.
When doing A/B testing, it’s important to always run just one test at a time, to maintain a control page that doesn’t get changed, and to keep track of your experiments for future learning.
Diversifying calls-to-action
A best practice is to have a variety of CTAs on your landing page. This allows site visitors to click on the next action that is most relevant to them and caters one page to more levels of the sales funnel. If your landing page is restricted to just one acceptable conversion type, such as creating an account, try using different wording around the page. It’s an easy way to test which description may appeal more to your audience.
For example, alternatives to “creating an account” are:
- Register here
- Join today
- Click to sign up
- Login
- Get started
Reducing website load speed
Your website load speed plays a big role in how many website visitors can access and navigate around your landing page. If the page can’t load quickly, visitors won’t be able to see your content, download the lead magnet, or fill the form that allows them to convert.
Google has a free tool called PageSpeed Insights to help you measure your page load speed and identify areas for improvement.
Cart abandonment emails
Plenty of e-commerce platforms and tools can help you identify when site visitors have loaded a product into their cart but failed to complete the transaction. This is great low hanging fruit to target these customers and convince them to follow-through. Some tactics that might help include:
- Offering a discount on their order
- Reminding them about the value of your offering
- Sharing that the item in their cart is low inventory or limited edition status
- Adding information to contact you in case they’re having technical issues
In case your lead didn’t add their email to the cart yet, you can also try targeting them through website cookies.
Exit intent pop-ups
A great tactic to improve conversion rates is to try and keep your visitor on your page. Exit intent pop-ups are a type of on-site advertisem*nt that only appear when visitors are about to leave the page. On these advertisem*nts, include limited edition offers, discounts, product tours, or free samples of your content to download. Even if the lead doesn’t end up converting into a paying customer, you can use their contact information in a future nurture campaign.
Reducing the number of form fields
Having a form on your landing page is necessary if you want to collect contact information. However, asking your contact to provide too much information can demotivate them from completing the form (and therefore you’ll lose out on this lead). Reducing the number of form fields from 11 to 4 can increase conversion by 120%.
How to get more traffic onto your site
As we mentioned earlier, your website traffic impacts your conversion rate. Even if you keep the conversion ratio the same, increasing your website traffic will allow you to earn higher results on your desired CTAs.
Some ways to boost your website traffic include:
- Earning organic traffic through search engine optimization. Writing blogs, whitepapers, and glossaries can help visitors find your page through search engines like Google, Bing, and Safari.
- Hosting webinars on other channels. You’ll be able to direct leads to your landing pages before, during, and after the event.
- Offering digital products that can be monetized or sold as free trials to bigger content. Include links to your landing page in the product.
- Run paid advertisem*nts on search engines or social media and point all paid traffic to your website. You can apply conversion rate optimization to paid campaigns as well.
- Post on social media to earn more organic traffic. Make sure to focus on platforms where your target audience goes for new information.
- Use QR codes at in-person events to register sign-ups, create new accounts, or book meetings for potential leads.
Other important metrics for your landing page
| Metric | Description | Goal |
| Bounce rate | Measures how many people are actually staying on your page after clicking into it. If they aren’t staying to see your site, it’s likely the content doesn’t line up with what they expected from the referral source or there is a page loading issue. | Make this as low as possible. |
| Time on page | Measures how long people are spending on your page. If they aren’t staying long, it’s likely you have content that doesn’t appeal to them or slow page load speeds. | Make this as high as possible. |
| Referral source | Measures how many people come from different sources like social media or other websites. | Use this to determine which channels to invest more into for higher website traffic growth. |
| Mobile vs. desktop | Measures the percentage of people that access your page via mobile, desktop, or tablet. You can also see which type or model of device users are on. | Use this to optimize your page appearance and load speed based on popular device types. |
Conclusion
Creating landing pages that are optimized for high conversion is important for generating a better return on investment. Knowing what your competitors are achieving for conversion rates and experimenting with your own on-page content can help you earn a conversion ratio that is relevant and worthwhile for your industry. As you grow your business, don’t forget to continuously review your website metrics, bring in new website traffic, and run A/B testing to find what performs best for your target audience.
Fortunately, there are plenty of tools on the market to help with achieving a good landing page conversion rate. For starters, try Thinkific’s website builder tool to create pages that market your business and help you sell digital products with ease.
