Glossary
Conversion rate: what it is, the formula, and how to improve it
Conversion rate tells you what share of visitors did what you wanted. The formula, what actually moves it, and why comparing across channels misleads.
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Conversion rate is the share of people who did what you wanted them to do. Divide conversions by visits in the same period. If 2,000 people reached your landing page and 60 left their details, your rate was 3%. It is the metric that connects the ad to the business: everything before it is traffic, everything after it is sales.
Formula
Conversion rate = (conversions ÷ visits) × 100.
The denominator decides the number. Ad clicks, page sessions and unique users give three different answers for the same campaign. Choose one, write it in the report, and keep it.
What counts as a good number
There is no useful internet average. What does help:
| Comparison | What it reveals |
|---|---|
| Against your own previous month | Whether something improved or broke |
| Between campaigns hitting the same page | Which traffic arrives better qualified |
| Between pages with the same traffic | Which page convinces more |
Comparing your rate against another company's rarely teaches anything, because price, sales cycle and the definition of a conversion are all different.
What actually moves it
In rough order of impact:
- Traffic quality. The wrong audience ruins any page.
- Match between ad and page. If the ad promises one price and the page shows another, the rate collapses on its own.
- Load speed, especially on mobile data.
- Form friction. Every extra field costs conversions.
- Clarity of the offer in the first five seconds.
That ordering matters when you are deciding what to test first. Teams usually start with button colours and headlines, which sit near the bottom of the list, and only get to traffic quality after weeks of small tests. If the CTR on the ad is healthy and the rate is still poor, the audience is probably fine and the page is not — but if both are weak, fix the targeting before you touch the page.
Three of those five sit outside the ads manager. When the rate drops, looking only at the campaign leaves half the problem untouched.
The trap of reading it without volume
With 40 visits, a single conversion moves the rate by two and a half points. That is not a signal. Before declaring a winning creative or a winning page, check whether the volume is large enough for the difference to mean anything.
If your rate fell and your cost per lead rose, continue with CPL to separate what belongs to the ad from what belongs to the page, or see how to connect Meta Ads to Claude to compare periods by asking.
Frequently asked questions
What is a good conversion rate?
It depends on the type of conversion, the price point and the channel. A simple form converts far better than a high-ticket purchase. Compare against your own history before any industry average.
Should I measure it on visits or on clicks?
Pick one denominator and stick to it. Landing page sessions is the common choice; using ad clicks inflates the number, because not every click loads the page.
Why did my rate drop when I changed nothing?
Traffic quality almost certainly changed: a colder audience, a different placement, a new creative. The page is the same, but the people arriving are not.