We love comparing ourselves to others and one thing every marketer wonders when they start doing conversion rate optimization is, how do our conversion rates compare to others.
The problem is, conversion rate is not a simple metric like unique visits. Comparing visits is apples to apples. Conversion rate comparison needs to be compared within simmilar industries and even then it’s not apples to apples and you know I prefer clean data over dirty data.
The chart above compares conversion rate by industry compiled from the 2012 MarketingSherpa Website Optimization Report Benckmark Survey.
However even comparing conversion rates industry to industry leaves room for fuzziness. Since conversion rate in this report is really an average of all conversion across a site. Conversion rates are vastly different with each product and each traffic source. When you blend them to get an overall average the bad ones bring down the good ones and hide a lot of sins.
When it comes to conversion optimization, I prefer the only benchmark that matters.
Benchmarking against yourself not the industry or any competitor. You can only make improvements against yourself like an athlete continuously getting better and improving his running time in increments.
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