Average website conversion rates vary by industry, but art typically reported between 2% and 10%, but your reality may vary.

Your own business’ best website conversion rate will depend largely on what you’re measuring, and how you’re measuring it.

What Should you Measure for Website Goals?

Google Analytics, the most popular website performance measurement platform on the planet, allows marketers to track many user behaviors as goals, and each of these goals will count as a conversion.

For professional service organizations, website conversions goals will most likely include email marketing opt-ins and form completions for requests for information.

For software and SaaS organizations, website conversion goals will likely include signups, downloads and purchases.

Travel and hospitality websites may track bookings as their primary website goal, while ecommerce will focus almost exclusively on online sales.

What should you measure? Start with your core business goal (sales, leads, signups, or requests for more information) and identify the points where your website most directly affects your goal.

As an example, if your organization is looking for more leads, the ‘contact us’ form and forms leading to whitepaper downloads should be tracked as part of your website analytics.

Avoid tracking ancillary goals such as ‘time on website’ and ‘pages viewed.’ Not only are they rarely direct indicators of business goals, but they’ll artificially inflate your website’s conversion rate.

The 2% to 10% average website conversion rate can be a fairly good benchmark by industry for a brand’s early reporting.