This wiki is maintained by Dave Chaffey of SMARTinsights to help keep marketers up-to-date with developments in digital marketing

From Marketing Online

Average conversion rates for E-commerce or online retail websites are highly sought after since companies are keen to benchmark their conversion performance against others in their sector. These are some of the best freely available sources.

Featured statistics: Ecommerce conversion rate compilation for UK retailers. See definitions in first link below. Source: Coremetrics.

Types of conversion rate

When benchmarking conversion rate, site owners should go beyond headline conversion rates to compare these four key types of conversion rate:

1. Overall site session (visit) conversion rate as reported in the Coremetrics example

2. Visitor conversion ratecalculated by dividing the number of conversion events by the number of unique visitors within a defined time period.

3. Shopping basket conversion rate (percentage who add item to basket who convert, e.g.

4. Session search conversion rate (percentage of visits which include a search (notice that conversion rate and average order value (AOV) tends to be higher for these visitors

Options for segmenting conversion rate

These different conversion rates and AOVs can then be segmented for different audiences to understand the quality of traffic or strength of propositions, for example:

• First time or repeat visitor conversion
• Referring channel conversion, e.g. paid or natural search, affiliates, display advertising
• Search type, e.g. paid or natural, brand, generic or long-tail
• Product category type
• Promotion type

Recommended sites for comparing Ecommerce conversion rate statistics

• UK conversion rates from Coremetrics - Coremetrics is rated by Forrester as one of the premium web analytics systems and offers sector specific conversion benchmarks to clients. Reports conversion rates as order sessions with clearly stated definitions of different types of conversion.

• US conversion rates from Coremetrics - Less detailed information is presented for the US

• Fireclick Index of conversion rates - provides conversion rates from less well-known analytics provider in different categories including Fashion / Clothing, Electronics and software

• Future Now summaries - Benchmarks category features graphical compilations from the main sources above

• Conversion rates for top 10 US retailers - These conversion rates are compiled by Marketing Charts from Nielsen data

• Compilation of Ecommerce rates from different sources in UK and US by Dave Chaffey