We’re spending a lot more time these days digging deeper into web analytics with clients.  Visitors and Pageviews are great to look at, but the real effort should be focused on conversions.

A “conversion” is a user-defined event. It can be anything you want it to be. Some common conversion events are:

  • Contact form submission
  • Phone call
  • Request for quote
  • Newsletter signup
  • Online purchase

One of the goals of any Internet Marketing strategy is to continually improve the results of your key metrics and conversion rates. In doing so, it is helpful to know how other companies are doing so you have a sense of what is attainable. Google Analytics provides some useful data for benchmarking standard metrics within your industry. However, one thing they are not currently benchmarking is conversion rates.

Do you wonder how your conversion rates measure up when compared to other websites?  Check out the chart below to see typical conversion rates for paid advertising (PPC), organic search (SEO) and online shopping engines, broken out by conversion type.

The data supports what we already know – organic conversion rates are typically higher than paid conversion rates. The reason is that organic searchers are often already familiar with the brand.  They have spent time searching for specific products or services and are more likely to be closer to purchasing. However, the conversion rate for PPC is not that far off at 5.8% for lead generation (contact forms, emails, etc) compared to 7.0% for organic search.

My take away’s are:

  1. PPC advertising should not be discarded. When used effectively, PPC can deliver highly targeted, relevant traffic that converts on a scale close to SEO.
  2. Search engine optimization (SEO) should be the number one tactic in your internet marketing strategy.  Organic results are more trusted, provide the opportunity for much higher traffic and generally convert higher than PPC search.

So, how do your results compare?