Conversion rate

A hundred visitors, three purchases, 3% conversion. Doubling it doubles revenue without a single extra visitor, which is why it is usually cheaper to improve conversion than to buy more traffic.

Rates vary enormously by context: 1-3% is typical for e-commerce, 20-40% for a well-matched email opt-in. Comparing yours to an average from a different context tells you nothing.

This is where the cheapest revenue in any business is hiding. Ten thousand visitors at 2% conversion and a $60 average order is $12,000. The same traffic at 3% is $18,000 - and moving from 2 to 3% is usually a few days of work on a page, against months of work to increase traffic by half. Look at the funnel before the ad account, every time.

Measure it per source or the number lies to you. Paid social converts at a fraction of branded search, so a blended rate falls when a good campaign scales and tells you nothing about either channel. Fix the definition first as well: a conversion counted at add-to-cart flatters everything downstream of it, and hides the checkout that is quietly failing.