What is conversion rate and how do you calculate yours?
Photo: Avila Ops Tecnologia
Conversion rate is the share of people entering your store who purchase. Calculate visitors who placed at least one paid order divided by total visitors, multiplied by 100. If 400 people visited and eight bought, the rate is 2%.
This answers November’s most expensive question: are there too few people, or does the store fail to convince them? With Black Friday ads running, every real spent sending traffic to a low-converting store is money lost.
How do you calculate it without fooling yourself?
Photo: Avila Ops Tecnologia
Choose a complete period, seven days or a month. Count unique visitors in the store dashboard. Count people with at least one paid order, not merely a created order: an unpaid boleto is intent rather than conversion. Someone buying twice counts once because the denominator counts each visitor once too. Divide and multiply by 100.
Calculate mobile and desktop separately. Most small stores receive nearly all visitors on phones, where stores often fail. A 1.5% overall rate may hide 1% on mobile and a checkout that freezes on phones. On WhatsApp, the formula is conversations resulting in at least one paid sale divided by conversations started. This is the sales funnel stage by stage.
What do you do with the number?
Compare with yourself rather than market averages. The trend matters: this week against last week, campaigns against ordinary months.
Low conversion with high traffic means the problem is inside the store: photos, prices, shipping or checkout. Good conversion with low traffic means the problem is outside: ads, Google or Instagram. To measure from click to purchase, Meta Pixel needs configuration.
What to do now
Calculate the last seven days by device. During Black Friday, repeat every morning. For automatic updates alongside average order value and daily orders, Avila Ops builds a dashboard with five numbers fitting one screen: avilaops.com/sistema-para-pequenas-empresas or WhatsApp wa.me/5517997811471.
Frequently asked questions
What is a good online-store conversion rate?
There is no single correct number; it depends on products, prices and visitor sources. Use an ordinary month’s rate as your reference.
Does conversion rate count created or paid orders?
Paid. Uncleared boletos and unreceived Pix are not sales. The difference between both rates shows losses at checkout.
How do you calculate WhatsApp conversion rate?
Conversations producing at least one paid sale divided by new conversations during the period. Without CRM, this is manual, which is why many people do not know their number.
Turn what you learned into your next step.
Tell us about your company and what you want to improve. We can explore the right tools, integrations or custom project together.