How to Use Conversion Rate Benchmarks to Optimize Your Conversion Funnel

Your eCommerce conversion rate (CVR) plays a significant role in the success of your online store. A high CVR creates a positive ROI from your marketing efforts and helps sustain success, while a lower conversion rate can be detrimental to long-term success. Learn how to optimize your conversion rate with industry conversion rate benchmarks today.

What is the eCommerce Conversion Rate Average?

Improving your CVR relies on setting realistic goals and gauging your success against your peers. Looking toward the overall conversion rate average and then drilling into industry-specific benchmarks is essential to understanding how you’re performing and what you can expect.

The overall average conversion rate for eCommerce is 2.3% across all industries. However, every industry has unique motivators, price points, and purchase frequency. 

You need to focus on conversion rate benchmarks by industry to see how you stack up against your competitors. A few industry-specific CVR benchmarks are:

• Grocery: 6.8%
• Health and beauty: 3.9%
• Fashion: 3.3%
• Consumer electronics: 1.4%
• Automotive: 0.7%
• B2B: 0.6%

You can see a deeper breakdown of industry, regional, and device-specific CVRs in our definitive conversion rate guide.

So what’s a good conversion rate? You can see from our industry benchmarks that comparing yourself to others in your industry is essential, not the overall average. 

For example, a grocery store comparing its CVR to the overall average might think they’re doing great but is actually falling behind the competition.

We developed Varos to help you learn the entire context behind your results by comparing your results to your peers. For example, you can see how our dashboard compares your conversion rate to the competition below:

What is an eCommerce Conversion Funnel?

We need to define what we mean by conversion funnel before diving into specific insights about how to use website conversion rate benchmarks. You likely already have a general idea about the conversion process, so getting specific is essential.

Your specific conversion funnel may look slightly different, but the typical conversion funnel looks something like this:

1. Awareness: The customer is made aware of your business and how your specific offering might address their pain points.
2. Interest: This stage often immediately follows awareness as the customer investigates your offering and how it might help them. Email lists and SMS opt-ins are ideal at this stage.
3. Desire: The visitor has enough information to want your product or service. Attention-grabbing, persuasive content helps move visitors into this stage in the funnel.
4. Conversion: This is where a visitor becomes a customer and improves your CVR. They make their purchase, and other tactics upsell or cross-sell to increase their average order value.
5. Re-Engage: After the customer receives their purchase, you re-engage them to leave a review, encourage repeat purchases, or follow your social channels. Creating a loyalty program can go far in this step.

How to Optimize Your Conversion Funnel for a Better CVR

What can you do to encourage visitors to move through the conversion funnel and become customers? Your industry-specific benchmark helps you set a specific goal to strive towards — now, let's get into how you can start making progress.

Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is a detailed process focusing on improving your entire online presence to increase conversions. Let’s dive into some of the specific CRO practices to help you boost conversion rates and ultimately grow your business.

Track Site or App Usage

In a CRO context, 'friction' describes anything throughout your website that might prompt a user to get frustrated and leave. Identifying and correcting any source of friction can go far in increasing your conversion rates.

You can find some friction sources with your own testing, but you likely won’t catch all of them. Tracking how users use your site or app at every step can significantly help identify any bottlenecks or problem areas prompting users to give up.

Popular analytics programs will help you track how users move through your website already. You can also explore various heatmap tools to get even more precise about where users encounter friction. And whenever you discover a source of friction, do everything you can to minimize or eliminate it.

Optimize for Mobile

Your conversion funnel will undoubtedly suffer if it’s not optimized for mobile users. 55% of all Internet traffic is from mobile users, with desktop devices responsible for 42%. Failing to optimize for mobile devices can eliminate more than half of your potential customers and likely more if you rely on traffic from social media ads.

Fortunately, creating a mobile-first eCommerce site is much easier now than ever before. Most eCommerce platforms, such as Spotify, take a mobile-first approach, as do third-party developers who make their themes.

Configure any necessary settings within your eCommerce platform to prioritize responsiveness and mobile devices. As a result, you’ll reduce bounce rates and help move customers through your conversion funnel.

Have a Clear Call-to-Action (CTA)

Your calls-to-action tell the visitor what to do next, and they should be used frequently throughout your conversion funnel. 

For example, your social media ad (step 1) will encourage them to click with a CTA. Then, the landing page will generate interest and, ideally, desire (steps 2 and 3). A CTA from the landing page to the product or transaction page completes the conversion journey (step 4).

A compelling CTA uses actionable, positive language to motivate users to keep going. It’s advisable to try out different verbiage, track changes, and see how minor adjustments can impact your CVR.

Add Reviews on Product Pages

Product reviews provide social proof that your product and company are worth the potential customers' time and money. For example, Amazon’s reviews are prominently displayed on search results and immediately allow customers to find the right product — you can use the same technique.

Build a product review system and motivate customers to return to rate their experience after receiving your product. Most eCommerce systems have plug-ins available for reviews or might have them already included.

Additionally, don’t remove negative reviews. Instead, learn from them and try to improve. Potential customers will quickly become suspicious if all of your products have perfect 5-star ratings.

Team Up with Varos for Real-Time Conversion Rate Benchmarks

Your conversion funnel is directly related to your conversion rate. Comparing your results after implementing the above changes to your peers helps you determine if the change made a meaningful impact on your CVR. Past results alone are not enough.

Remember, sometimes conversions are affected by industry or global events. So if your results exist in a vacuum, it’s hard to tell if external factors influence CVR increases or decreases. 

Using Varos for real-time eCommerce conversion rate benchmarks ensures you always see the complete picture. In addition, our dashboard gives you insights into CVR alongside other essential metrics, such as cost per conversion:

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Are you ready to understand the entire context behind your results with competitor benchmarking? Sign up or book a demo today to unlock potent data-driven insights.

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About the Author

Yarden Shaked

Co-founder & CEO at Varos

LinkedIn