Whether you're an Internet retailer or direct marketer, you're probably interested in how your conversion rate compares with your competitors' conversion rates. The Conversion Rate Index (CRI) establishes a source for conversion rate comparisons.

Benchmark Data
Actual conversion rates depend on many variables, including seasonality, web site response time, ad quality, etc. So it's always difficult to provide normative data for specific circumstances. While we can’t give you an exact answer to the question, "what should my conversion rate be?" the CRI serves as a effective yardstick against which you can measure the impact of your marketing programs on overall conversion data.

Our benchmark represents aggregated data across an etailer data sample. It might not be suited perfectly to your individual situation, but it does give you a number to at least gut check your own experiences.

CRI Data Through May 2007

The data in the benchmark shows the following:

• The overall aggregate measure of conversion rate from the etailer sample is 1.91 percent.
• PPC Search traffic has a better conversion rate than straight Organic traffic, 4.52 percent versus 1.75 percent.
• Paid Comparison Shopping Engines convert at almost the same rate is Paid Search 4.24 percent
• The free Comparison Shopping Engine (Froogle) beats everything at 4.63 percent

Please note that seasonality has a large effect on these numbers. Just looking at the overall aggregate numbers, conversion rates during the pre-Christmas time period were 1.9 percent. From that period to today, the overall conversion rates are at 1.45 percent.

How to Improve Your Conversion Rates

Here are a few guidelines that can help you improve your conversion rates:

1. Devote resources to effective SEO. Organic traffic is still a large component of many of our customer’s web sites. This can be inferred by the weighting of the numbers. Organic traffic isn’t free, and this number shows that a well executed SEO campaign could have a large effect on your bottom line.
2. Develop a sophisticated paid search strategy. Paid search executed well can result in good conversion rates. Targeted ads and quality landing pages should result in higher conversion rates than your organic traffic. PPC when done right can be an important part of driving conversions on your site.
3. Leverage the Comparison Shopping Engines. If you sell products on your site, you should almost certainly be using some of the Comparison Shopping Engines. They have excellent conversion rates and good predictable bid prices.
4. Make sure you advertise on Froogle. Froogle is a great resource. It’s the only one we are highlighting specifically since it’s a bit one-of-a-kind. If you sell products, we can’t think of a reason why you wouldn’t want to be on Froogle.

Make sure you have the tools to track conversion rates across all your advertising sources, including search engines, shopping engines, banner ads, email marketing, RSS feeds, affiliates, etc. It’s also helpful if you can roll up all of your results in a single dashboard so you can quickly see where you might have problems with a source or campaign.

By analyzing your profit generated from each source along with your conversion rates, you can make good, informed decisions about how to optimize any of the components that are affecting your conversion rates.