Conversion Rate: From Visitor to Customer

Simple definition

Conversion Rate measures the percentage of people who complete a specific action out of the total who had the opportunity to. "Visitor to signup" is the most common conversion rate for solo founders, but you'll track several: landing page to signup, signup to activated user, trial to paid, and free to upgraded.

Each conversion rate is a different lever. A 3% landing page conversion rate means 97 out of 100 visitors leave without signing up. Doubling that to 6% has the same effect on signups as doubling your traffic -- but it costs almost nothing compared to buying twice as many clicks.

How to calculate it

Conversion rate = Conversions / Total visitors x 100

Say your pricing page got 1,200 visitors last month and 48 people started a trial:

Conversion rate = 48 / 1,200 x 100 = 4%

Now layer it. Of those 48 trials, 14 converted to paid:

Trial-to-paid rate = 14 / 48 x 100 = 29.2%

Your end-to-end conversion from pricing page visit to paying customer is 14 / 1,200 = 1.17%. Small improvements at each stage multiply together.

Example

You sell a $39/month project management tool. Your landing page gets 800 visits/month from organic search with a 2.5% signup conversion rate (20 signups). Trial-to-paid is 25% (5 customers). That's $195/month in new MRR. You rewrite your landing page headline to focus on a specific pain point instead of a generic tagline. Signup rate jumps to 4.2% (34 signups). Trial-to-paid stays at 25% (8.5 customers, round to 8). New MRR from that channel: $312. You just added $117/month in new MRR by changing a headline. Over a year, that's $1,404 in additional revenue from a 30-minute copywriting change.

Related reading

• Activation Rate
• Bounce Rate