“If you can’t explain it to a six-year-old, you don’t understand it yourself.” ~Albert Einstein.
When you understand how sales conversion rate is calculated, and what a new lead is actually worth, you can direct your marketing efforts more sensibly without throwing your money away on advertising that doesn’t bring a return on investment (ROI).
I’m going to show you exactly how business owners (or marketers) can easily figure out:
- How to calculate conversion rate
- What your lead value is
- How many leads you need each month to stay afloat
- How much you should pay for advertising
If you are a business owner and you don’t have a handle on how to calculate these metrics, then you are likely just shooting from the hip, trying different things without really knowing what the true ROI is. That changes starting with this next step.
It all Starts With Tracking
You need to start keeping track of your leads and how you acquire them. It doesn’t require much effort, but it’s critical and it needs to be part of your process. Luckily I have a free resource for you at the bottom of this article.
I suggest you download my inquiry tracking spreadsheet and start tracking your leads. If you’re not tracking your leads, you have no point of reference and you’re swinging in the dark.
What is a Lead?
In marketing terms, a lead is any person or entity (as in a business) that is potentially interested in purchasing your product or service. Some leads are going to be better than others.
A “hot lead” might be more qualified (more ready to buy) than say a “cold lead” that needs more convincing before pulling the trigger. For this reason, a hot or warm lead would be understandably more valuable to you than a cold lead… But how valuable?
We’ll explore the value of a lead more in-depth in a bit, but first, let’s talk about conversions.
What is a Conversion?
A conversion is any action that you define. It could be a purchase, an old-fashioned phone call, contact form submission, newsletter signup, social share, a specified length of time a visitor spends on a web page, playing a video, a download, etc.
Many of the small businesses that I meet only have a gut sense of where their new business comes from because they haven’t been tracking conversions.
Knowing your conversion rate(s) is the first step in understanding how your sales funnel is performing and what marketing avenues are giving the greatest return on investment (ROI).
Conversion Rate and How to Calculate It
Once you have defined what conversions you want to track, you can calculate the conversion rate. For the purposes of the following example, let’s call a conversion a sale.
Even if you’re still in the dark ages without a viable website, as long as you are tracking the number of leads you get and the number of resulting sales (conversions), you can calculate your conversion rate like so…
Conversion Rate = Total Number of Sales / Number of Leads * 100
Example: Let’s say you made 20 sales last year and had 100 inquiries/ leads. Your sales-to-lead conversion rate would be 20%.
If you’re tracking conversions from website leads, your formula looks like this:
Conversion Rate = Total Number of Sales / Number of Unique Visitors * 100
Example: If you made 20 sales in a month and you had 2,000 unique visitors to your site, your conversion rate would be 1%.
What is The Value of a Lead?
The value of something is what it’s worth to you. If you sell lawn irrigation systems at an average price of $2,000 installed and you turn a lead into a sale, then that lead is worth $2,000 to you.
However, we know that not every lead you get will end in a sale. In reality, you might only turn two out of 10 inquiries into a sale. That would make your conversion rate 20% (2/10 * 100 = 20).
That means you can expect to generate about $4,000 from your 10 leads (2 sales @ $2,000 ea). That’s because we know on average you are closing 2 out of 10 sales, a 20% conversion rate. This means that the value of one lead is actually $400 (4,000/10).
Here’s the formula:
Lead Value = Value of Sale / Number of Leads
The previous example is a bit simplistic and you can get much deeper with this stuff. As we discussed earlier, some leads will be more qualified than others and we will also want to look at the actual profit – not just the revenue. More on that in a minute.
Why The Value of a Lead Becomes Useful
When you know the value of a lead, you can determine how many leads you need each month to sustain your business and how much you should pay for advertising. This is true whether you use pay-per-click (PPC) or offline advertising, like mailers or print ads.
Conversions Needed = Desired Revenue / Lead Value
Example: Let’s say you need to generate $15,000 per month to float your irrigation business. Based on your conversion rate of 20% (2 sales / 10 leads x 100 = 20) from the previous example, you already know that each lead is worth about $400 (4,000/10).
This means, you would need about 37-38 leads per month (15,000 / 400 = 37.5) to make about 7-8 sales ($2,000 ea) and generate $15,000 in revenue.
(Note: This is a very simple example using revenue generated. A more accurate option would be to use the profit generated by sales and not just the revenue, but many businesses have difficulty defining this number so we use revenue as a guide.)
Example: If each sale of $2,000 actually costs you $1,000 to deliver, the profit on each sale is really $1,000. To get a return on your “advertising spend,” you’ll actually need to generate 75 leads to reach your $15,000 monthly goal.
The math:
1 sale = $1,000 profit
Conversion rate = 20% (2/10 * 100 = 20%)
Average lead Value = $200 ($2,000 /10 = $200)
Leads needed = 75 ($15,000 / $200 = 75)
Even if you use revenue instead of actual profit, as long as you are constantly tracking these metrics, you will be able to make much more informed decisions.
Understanding your sales funnel can help you determine the number of leads you need to get each month, how much you can safely spend on advertising, and what you can expect in return.
How to Leverage Lead Value to Your Advantage
In the business world, things aren’t always so simple. Not all sales are going to be equal. Some sales will be a home run, and others won’t.
Also, the conversion rates will be different depending on the traffic source. You may find that leads generated by paid search convert better because you’ve been hyper-focused on your advertising, using keywords with extremely high commercial intent and/or targeting customers that are very local to you.
So with an average order value of $2,000, you might see something like this:
This shows that the value of a lead may be different depending on the lead source.
From this, you can see that a lead generated from your paid search campaign is worth more to you than a lead generated from an organic search.
If you have Google Analytics installed on your site (and you should), you can determine the average lead value and enter this into your analytics goal, then Google Analytics will do most of the hard work for you.
If you just stuff the average revenue value into the goal value, you’ll see highly inflated numbers that won’t make sense, as not every lead generated from the website will actually result in a sale.
Using a realistic lead value as your goal value will give you a clearer insight into how your website is performing.
Resources
Here’s a Google spreadsheet that I share with my clients so they can track leads. You’ll need to have a Google account if you want to make a copy and save it for yourself to use.
If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment. I do my best to answer each and every one.
Love this article. Short, well explained and easy to understand. Great job. Thanks!
You are welcome.
Thank you that was very clear and, well explained!
Thanks Arthur 🙂
I am working my way through an Internet Marketing MS and this is the best breakdown I have seen yet. Thanks for posting and I shared it on Twitter.
Hi Jen, I’m glad you got what you needed and I do appreciate the share. 🙂
Awesome content. I’m a little slow so please bare with me lol. Let’s say you have a $37 product and you want to make $3000 a month from it. How do you calculate how much traffic you need to get that number? Thank you.
Thanks for the kind words Peter. First, before you can make that calculation, you need to know how well your site is converting those visits into sales. You need to know the conversion rate. Conversion Rate = Total Number of Sales / Number of Unique Visitors X 100. Once you know that number you’re on your way. Assuming the $37 item does not have any manufacturing costs associated with it, you would need to sell around 81 of those to make $3,000. ($3,000/$37 = 81). Let’s then assume that you figured out your conversion rate to be 2% (2 sales for every 100 visitors). So your answer to your problem would be phrased as, “2% of what number equals 81?” The answer to that is 4,050 visitors. You can see how I made the calculation using this nifty tool.
Awesome! Thanks a million, Jordan.
Hi There!
Quick question, how should I calculate the conversion rate of #of Conversion with the Value Of Conversion. Like saying an agent made 4 hotel bookings and the total value of the 4 hotel bookings is $26,696.28 How can I calculate the conversion rate? Please help..Thanks!
Hey Leti,
In order to calculate the rate of conversions you also need to know the number of leads. For example, if you had 10 hotel inquiries and only 4 of those turned into sales, then the conversion rate is 40%.
You can calculate your conversion rate using this formula:
Conversion Rate = Total Number of Sales / Number of Leads * 100
And here’s the math:
4/10 = .4
.4 x 100 = 40 (40% conversion rate)
Hi Jordan,
If i wish to analyse lead to sales conversion rate month-wise, then do we need to introduce ‘time’ factor e.g. conversion rate for november would be Total Number of Sales (closed in November ) / Number of Leads ( generated in November) * 100.
However the leads converted to sales in November may not have been generated in the month of November. Would this factor make considerable difference ?
Thx, Sailee
I need to think about this, but as with all metrics, it’s important to understand what and why you’re trying to measure in the first place.
What’s the business objective, and specific website goal(s) that you’re trying to measure performance against?
If you’re just looking at how well the site is performing, then you’ll want to look at both the on-site (visitor to lead) conversion rate and the offsite (lead to sale) conversion rate.
When looking at the offsite part of that, you will want to know the length of time it takes to turn a lead into a sale.
If there’s seasonality (holidays etc) then you’ll want to account for that by comparing the month against the previous year, rather than the previous month.
At the end of the day, it’s all about understanding if a metric is good/bad and that’s done by determining what your target should be.
I think if you’re trying to use a complicated formula to try and factor out the external factors affecting conversions you’re probably over complicating things.
Nice article. Could I know rough average of the conversion ratio in some different sales fields like real estate and insurance ?
Hossam,
Your question is too broad. There are so many variables affecting conversion rate. You can’t really say the average conversion rate for a real estate sale is X. Not all realtors are created equal. One business might have more leads that another. That would affect conversion rate. One business might have better sales agents then another. That too would affect conversion rate. Demand or the lack of it would also be a factor. And the list goes on.
You have to be clear on what you’re measuring. Are we talking about on-site (visitor to lead) conversion rate or offsite (lead to sale) conversion rate? Lot’s to consider.
Thanks for your interest
I need just rough range about real estate and insurance fields offsite “real physical life”
Just examples or rough range
Thanks again
Hossam, I’m not going to be able to help you in this department. I don’t have this kind of inside info of the real estate or insurance industry.
Woooooohhh!!! great article, I’m presently developing a report within a Telecoms Industry and it has capture the attention of my Bosses after explaining to them the preliminary stages, they are looking forward to its completion. will be communicating with you using actual figures to complete my project……Thank You Once again. I called the project ‘BUSINESS HEALTH ANALYTICS’ as I’m reporting from the Revenue Assurance Department.
Hey Reginald,
Glad you found the article helpful and thanks for your comment.
The premise around this analysis is to measure the Conversion Ratio from Deferred Revenue driven by Sales versus Reload behavioral pattern of Subscribers showing the Number of days taken for a subscriber to utilize their Balance. Analytics is feed by the workings that shows the health of the Business from End-to-End.
How can I sort consultants ranking by looking at the number of leads received in RELATION to the number of leads received. We have 18 consultants and if person 1 received 10 leads and converted 5 it’s 50% and the same for person 2 who received 50 leads and converted 25 is also 50%. It means that person 2 dix better, so I want to give them leads based on performance in relation to the number of leads received. Please can anybody help
The problem here is that just looking at the conversion rate doesn’t give you enough information from which to make sensible business decisions.
When deciding which metrics to track you must understand why you’re tracking them and how they’re going help inform your decisions.
So what is important when you’re comparing your consultants?
There are potentially a lot of variables in play here.
How successfully is the consultant converting their leads. – Beware that this isn’t just measuring the effectiveness of the consultant, but also the difficulty of converting the leads. (Not all leads are equal)
You also need to consider the value of the lead. I don’t know if in this case each lead has the same value or a variable value. You’ll want to make sure you understand the true value of a conversion though. 25 conversions is almost certainly going to be worth more than 5 conversions (unless the value of these 5 conversions was worth more than the value of the 25 conversions!)
When comparing the performance of these consultant you’ll want to look at:
*Total number of leads/consultant
*Total number of conversions/consultant
*Lead conversion rate/consultant
*Total value of conversions/consultant
*Average value of conversions/consultant (if the value of each conversion varies)
In itself this still doesn’t provide all the answer. You need to track this information month by month to look for trends.
Instead of looking at just the individual metrics, you need to dig into why, eg: “why did consultant x’s conversion rate fall this month,” “why does consultant z manage to convert at a higher rate. Are they doing something different or are they getting a different quality of lead?”
You might find that if a consultant spends more time/lead they have a better conversion rate, but obviously limits the number of leads they can pursue in a month. Where is the sweet spot?
By understanding the different factors that are influencing your consultants performance you can put together a plan to improve their effectiveness and track their performance over time.
Hope this is helpful and doesn’t add more to the confusion.
YOU ROCK!!!
You have such an awesome ability to:
1) analyze the situation
2) determine the needed data
3) explain all of that to mere mortals.
By themselves, each of those is a talent in short supply. Put them together and you are a powerhouse of knowledge.
Thank you for sharing your gifts with the world!!
Hey Meg, thanks for the kind words. Always glad to help. 🙂
Hi. I need some assistance. I read your article and it was very helpful.
I’m in a cram bc I’m in digital marketing but my VP doesn’t establish any conversions any tracking etc. I was challenged to get this together.
The CEO wants 50 leads a month.
What formula or how do I show: if we do xyz we will get 50 leads a month..
Assuming we are just talking about web leads, the first step is to establish what a conversion is to your organization and start tracking those now. If it’s as simple as a contact form submission, then setup that goal in Google Analytics and start tracking that data asap.
Though you said you have not been tracking conversions to date, it sounds like you have some idea of the average number of leads/month. We’ll call a lead a conversion for purposes of this conversation. I would use your average number of leads as a rough estimate to establish your current baseline conversion rate. In your case, conversion rate = Total Number of inquiries / Number of Unique Website Visitors * 100. (If your leads are not coming from website visitors, then you need to establish where they are coming from and how many per/mo.
Without knowing the “xyz” of what you are doing to increase leads, and without knowing how those variables have impacted the flow of leads in the past, there is no real way to project the influence of such variables for the future.
For website leads, we need to look at which traffic is converting. Is it referral traffic from a specific website? Or maybe it’s organic traffic to a specific page on your site? Or perhaps it’s a PPC landing page? facebook advertising? or maybe an email campaign? There are many possible channels for leads.
It’s important to note that increasing your number of leads is meaningless if the leads are crappy leads. Then you wasted your resources generating leads that didn’t turn into paying customers and you’re CEO will likely not be too impressed.
Thanks for the clear, concise article. I was trying to articulate this to some of our sales team and your breakdown really helped me make it easy for them to conceptualize what Marketing is up to.
Glad to hear it Phil.
Thanks for your content. I am not going to beat around the bush. I am horrible at math. Now with my new position i have to convert rates at the end of each month. I have had it explained to me in so many different ways and all are not helping me. say I have 43 referrals and 20 admits how would i figure out the conversion rate for this?? i appreciate this in advance.
Samantha, in your case the formula is 20/43 * 100 (thats 20 divided by 43 times 100). Your answer is 46.5% … thats your conversion rate. You are converting a little less than half of your referrals into “admits.”
Hi Jordan,
I need to calculate conversion rate as per given scenario
Total sales – 500000 monthly
Total visitor – 40000 out of 200000(targeted volume)
Suraj, No sure I follow you. What do you mean by “targeted volume”? Also, are you saying 40,000 visitors accounted for 500,000 sales?
Jordan,
excellent information on determining how to put a dollar amount on each lead. This is also an excellent way to verify how productive your sales staff is both individually and as a group. I would love to add a link to your article from my linked in page, I know it helps me and I believe it is a simple but often times over looked tool for the average sales person to sharpen and adjust their skills over time.
Thanks for the kind words Tracee.
Pretty Pretty nice article.
Thanks.
Hi Jordan,
I am trying to figure out what is the impact on conversation rate by adding an additional sales channel.
For example if my current conversion rate is 15% only using a channel like in person, but i have statistics that show 19% of people want to use an online channel. If i provided an online channel what would be the impact to conversion?
I appreciate any guidance in advance!
Hi Doc,
The “statistics” you mention of 19% are just that, they are statistics … numbers used for the purpose of “inferring proportions in a whole from those in a representative sample.” So the 19% number you mention would have no actual baring on your conversion rate per say.
That said, if you were to provide another marketing channel, (like an online channel) your conversion rate could be tracked in different ways depending on what you’re interested in knowing. If your conversion goal is the same for each channel (sale of your product or service) then you could lump all of the leads and sales figures into one formula. If you want to track and compare conversion rates for “in person” conversions and “online conversions,” then obviously you would not lump all of the figures into one formula.
Example of combining conversion rates:
15% in-person conversion rate (15 sales divided by 100 in-person leads times 100 = 15%)
15% online conversion rate (15 sales divided 100 unique website visitors times 100 = 15%)
15% overall combined conversion rate (30 sales divided by 200 leads [in-person and unique website visitors] times 100 = 15%)
Keep in mind, I have no idea what you are selling, but my guess is that you would likely want to track these two types of conversions separately so that you could better understand how to improve each sales funnel.
For example, the sales conversation or sales pitch for in-person prospects might differ slightly depending on the situation, the type of client and what you’re selling. Over time, you learn how to temper your sales pitch to address the prospect’s concerns and doubts. Understanding how this impacts conversions is critical to understanding how to improve your process.
That same conversation will have to be brought online and tailored slightly for each type of website visitor and the problem they are trying to solve. You’ll likely be very interested in what this conversion rate is so that you can tighten up your funnel as you better understand where people drop off and leave your site… but that is a whole nother conversation.
Hope that’s helpful to you.
Wonderful article! I am developing a financial dashboard for my company. We are an architectural firm with proposals that range from $1500 to $100,000. I have been calculating our conversion rate by $$$ and not my the quantity. I did this because of the severity of the range in figures. We might write 25 proposals for $1500-$15,000 and one for $100,000 in a month. I am tracking all proposals by year they are written to when contracts are accepted in the year and using the dollar figures of $$$accepted/$$$total proposals.
My question is if we write a proposal now in September it may not be accepted until January. Do you think this would skew my figures? Or should I take a different approach ?
Thank you for any insight you can provide.
Hi John,
I’m sure you have your reasons for tracking your proposals in this manner. As you pointed out some businesses do have a longer sales cycle, which can make it challenging to track sales. The important thing is to understand why you’re tracking and what you’re going to do with the information. I’d be interested in understanding what kind of insights you’re hoping to glean from your tracking efforts.
We are tracking to see our conversion rate. It’s part of our financial dashboard and we compare the % approved by year and compare years and year to date to see if we have a problem or a problem in the industry. We honestly use it as an alarm to do some follow up on stale proposals. We are not high pressure sales we are professional services and want to ensure our efforts to write proposals is worth the effort. Also we want to build our clientele and have been writing proposals for new clients and want to see if our conversion rate if it increases or decreases. Our conversion rate is pretty consistent within a few percentage points and we can begin to project how many proposals we have to write or how much total fee we have to write to meet our growth expectations. Also for hiring needs and to project how many professional hours are required to service these contracts. The timing is the toughest part but we estimate future contracts based on the conversion rate multiplied by the total of pending proposals.
I think I would track the dates for the proposal and acceptance events. Then instead of looking at 2015 conversion rates, I’d look at the last 90 days, last 120 days, etc. Excel/Google Sheets can do the date math. The date ranges would be rolling, and you could compare the past 120 days to the past 240-121 days, or year over year if you want. That’s if I’m understanding it correctly. Sounds like you should ignore calendar years and use a rolling range of days.
For instance, what percentage of proposals written 1/1/2016-3/31/2016 have converted as of 10/1/2016. Compare that with proposals written 10/1/2015-12/31-2015 that converted by 7/1/2016. Then you know if the rate is steady, or going up or down. Aside from seasonality, that should be an apples-to-apples comparison.
I need to calculate how much more my business could have done in one week, had my conversion rate been .5% more.
Apologies for the late reply. My work load has been particularly heavy.
The conversion rate and total revenue go up at the same rate.
If your base conversion rate is 15%, and it goes up 0.5%, then the new conversion rate is 15.5%. That’s an increase of 3.33%
( 15.5 – 15 ) / 15 = .0333
It’s easier to think about going from 10% conversion rate to 15% conversion rate. That’s an increase of 50%.
( 15 – 10 ) / 10 = .5
If your conversion rate goes up 3.33%, then your revenue also goes up 3.33%. Hopefully that’s helpful.
Thank you for your article, it help me out.
You are most welcome.
Nice and well explained.
Thanks for sharing the resource too.
Does the value of sale need to remain constant? Let’s say we work with Enterprises so there is no real value of sale in a sense that a lot of the packages have different pricing. would i just average out all the value of sales against all the leads? just aggregate all the values?
the example you gave was a flat price of 2k. but what if there is not flat price. that’s what i’m saying. how would i find the lead value then? please answer!
Gal,
As stated, some of the examples were in the article are simplistic and may not suit ever business’s need.The purpose of assigning a lead value and tracking your conversion rate is to help you measure the effectiveness of your marketing efforts and to set appropriate goals for the business regarding advertising budget, content creation, social media, etc. That said, if it makes sense to average out the value of all sales against all leads, then I would support that. You would at least have some a general guide to measure your success.
However, in your situation, you might have to segment your leads to get more meaningful insights. For example, if you know that vacation package 1 conversions are worth more to the business than vacation package 2 conversions, then you may want to create conversion goals in Google Analytics for these two goals and track those individually. Then of course, you would be looking at the advertising channels that are leading to the different types of conversions. This way you can decide which channels are producing the best quality leads.
Hope this is helpful.
Hi Jordan!
This is a fantastic article. I was beating my head against a wall and then I found your page. THANK YOU!
My question refers to the segment where you mentioned the irrigation business figuring out how many leads it needed based on a goal revenue amount ($15k). I totally get that. However, I am in the fitness space where the majority of our transactions are recurring monthly “Subscriptions” or “Dues”, if you will.
Do you know how might I calculate my goal lead number when working with recurring revenue and growing that number over time? Would it make more sense to take the average yearly value of each sale?
Example: If I have $25k in recurring monthly dues this month and want to eventually reach a goal of $50K with average dues being $40/month, how many leads would I need to obtain at an 18% conversion rate ?
Any insight you could provide would be much appreciated.
Thank you for your time and talent! 🙂
Hi Melinda,
Sorry for the late reply. I have a lot of work on at the moment. And thanks for the kind words. I’m glad the info was helpful to you.
As I understand you:
$25K/mo @ $40/payment
That calculates to 625 recurring sales each month:
$25,000/$40 = 625 sales/mo
Your goal is to reach $50K/mo = 1,250 sales/mo.
You want to know, how many leads you need to reach an 18% conversion rate? However, we don’t know what your actual conversion rate is. Of those 625 paying customers you have each month, we don’t know many leads you needed to get those prospects to convert into paying customers?
To be accurate you’d need to know the churn rate – what percent of customers cancels each month. You need 625 new customers to get from 25k/mo to 50k/mo. Now, if you already had an 18% conversion rate, then you need, uh, …around 3,500 leads.
BUT!
You are on to something with yearly average. For recurring revenue we like to calculate Customer Lifetime Value – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Customer_lifetime_value
And that’s what you use to figure out how much you want to pay for leads/conversions.
So, not being sure what exactly you asking for, there’s some random information that might help.
I have the average lead value of $1.75. Current conversion for the month is 5%. Cost for the month is $360. Based on your article, I need to have $360/$1.75=206 leads.
In your opinion, which area should I focus on to have a better conversion rate?
Chin,
I don’t understand your question.
Which area of what? Conversion rate can be impacted by so many things. For example, a poorly designed website can negatively impact conversions. Weak copy and low search exposure can also have a similar effect. I’d need to know more to adequately answer your question.
Very informative… been doing direct sales lately; although this is relating to websites, found it interesting. thank you.
Nitish,
You’re welcome. Glad you found it useful.
Great reference! Short article while easy to understand and really useful!
Jordan you are the man, thank you for this! This has really helped me, I’ve saved your website for future business 🙂
I’ve got a scenario please just want to confirm if i’m on the right path;
let’s say I have 3,870 visitors in total & 2,010 opted in = 51.94 % (lead conversion rate)
The next calculation I’m looking to find out is my actual sale conversion rate, would I calculate my actual total number of opted-in leads that converted say it was 1,003 (opted-in leads) actually purchased my offer and divide it by the total 3,870 total visitors. If not, would it be by the total opted in amount, which in this case would be 2,010, to work out my sales conversion rate?
so examples;
1,003 / 3,870 x 100 = 25.92 (sale conversion rate)
OR
1003 / 2,010 X 100 = 49.90 (sale conversion rate)
Thanks
John
Hi John,
Thanks for the kind words. It’s tough to say what the “best path” is without knowing more specifics of what you’re trying to accomplish and how you will use the data. Both of those scenarios you outlined are correct, and both of those sales conversion rate numbers could prove useful (25.92% and 49.90%). Your overall sales conversion rate would be 1,003 / 3,870 x 100 = 25.92%. That’s the sales conversion rate for that traffic/lead source.
Assuming the “visitors” in your example are website visitors, then knowing that the opt-in lead conversion rate is 51.94% tells us that your opt-in offer has a high success rate. So your offer is well-aligned with your target market. That lead conversion rate can help you further optimize the first part of your funnel, the opt-in offer.
The opt-in offer qualifies your leads, but what happens between the opt-in and the sale is another matter. I would say that the second number (49.9% sales conversion rate) is more meaningful/useful for optimizing the second part of your funnel, the sales process. That would be the alignment of the sale item with the opt-in offer, at an appropriate price point.
Not sure if that’s the answer you were looking for. Data by itself is just data. The way the data is used is what gives it value.
Thorough as usual 🙂
thank you makes perfect sense.
Brief, straight to the point and easy to understand. Love your style and explanation.
Hey, thanks Jasmine. Appreciate the feedback. 🙂
Hi Jordan,
How do you recommend calculating conversions that are delayed? We offer a 2-week trial, so often conversions don’t come through immediately. We run into a problem when it comes to reporting monthly ROAS, while trying to attribute each purchase to ads clicked 2+ weeks prior.
Any insight you can provide would be great- thanks!
-Rachel
Rachael,
AdWords can still track that, if the visitor has the cookie from the first time they clicked the ad. But it would always be a 2-week delay in reporting, and if you made a change to the campaign you’d need to wait 2 weeks to see the results. So for example, with a two week trial, you might have conversions that are on the first and last days of the 14 day trial, so if you make a marketing change you really need to wait for the 14th day before you know the impact.
Hi Jordan,
Great article, very well explained and extremely helpful.
Thank you.
Regards,
A.
Hello Jordan,
Very insightful write up,
I have read most of the question posted and your answers.
Thank you for sharing, its been very helpful.
More grace,
best regards
Becca
Hello again Jordan,
Thank you once again for sharing, I have learnt a lot but am really having challenges applying the head knowledge.
Kindly assist, I tried calculating but got more confused as I went along
What would be the sales conversion if, I have 4 sales agents with a target of 1 sale @ $2000,000 per unit each for a sales person every month.
How many leads would each sales person need to meet in order to meet up with this target owing to previous sales being unit@ $2,000,000 per unit per sales person.
Thank you for generosity with your time.
Regards
Becca
Becca,
Thanks for your kind words. There is needed data missing from your question. In order to know how many leads each sales person would need to meet your target, you would need to understand what your conversion rate is. You need to know how many leads come in each month and how many sales (conversions) are made from the monthly pool of leads. Once you know what that number is you can figure this out.
For example, using the same logic as the irrigation example, if your sales people are closing 2 units per month (that’s $4,000,000 @ $2,000,000/unit) from a pool of about 100 leads/month. That’s a 2% conversion rate (2/100 * 100)=2.
This means, all things being equal, you can expect to generate $4,000,000 from every 100 leads. That actually makes the value of a lead $40,000 because… (Lead Value = Value of Sale / Number of Leads). The math on that is $4,000,000/100 = $40,000.
Knowing the value of a lead, you can figure out how many leads you need each month to reach your goal of $2,000,000 in sales. You would need about 50 leads per month ($2,000,000/ 40,000 = 50 leads). So to make 1 sale @$2,000,000 ea month you would need about 50 leads/mo.
Again, this is a simplistic example. We are assuming that all things are equal, but in the real world we know this is not completely true. For example, all members of your sales team are probably not equally as good at selling. And we need to consider the quality of the lead as well. Not all leads are created equal. Leads from your facebook campaigns might be less likely to buy over your email marketing leads, etc. Hopefully this answers your question.
Good article. Thank you for sharing
Thanks Jordan for this easy and informative concept. It really helped me.
Regards,
Parul Srivastava
Glad you found the info helpful Paul.
Hi Jordan,
Simply wanted to Thank you for the above article. It was very Helpful.
Thank you
You are very welcome. Glad you found it helpful. 🙂
Not sure why I always forget this. But if I had 17 buyers out of 534 unique visitors what is my conversion rate? More so, how do I figure it out?
I know 1 percent of 500 is 5.
I had 17 sales.
So my conversion rate is 3. something percent. But I’m confused at the easy way to get the exact number?
Hey Rhandell,
The formula is: Conversion Rate = Total Number of Sales / Number of Unique Visitors * 100
So in your case you would use your calculator to divide 17 by 534 (=.0318) and then multiply that by 100 to get your answer of 3.18% … or you could round that to 3.2% cconversion rate.
Just stumbled across this and I’m amazed, even my simple brain can understand your excellent breakdown and explanation. Thank you!
Haha! Glad that helped.
hello Jordan, could you help me. i’ve often tried to get a conversion rate off the ground but failed every time. probably because i’m over complicating it!
i have a list of all quotes raised/entered 2017 and it has 947 quotes on it of which 455 were converted into an order, this gives a ratio of 48%
what about 2018 though?…
a) do i just reset the numbers (just looking at 2018) or…
b) do i simply keep the calculation going using combined 2017 & 2018 data or…
c) do i always look at a 12 month (or quarter, 1 month) moving time window (looking back from ‘today’)?
sorry, a bit muddily put but hopefully you can help 🙂
Nathan,
Sorry for the late reply. The answer to your question really has more to do with what metrics you need in order to help you make appropriate decisions for your business. If you need to be able to compare this year to last year, then “resetting the numbers” as you say, may make sense if you have no other way to measure this. If you have software that can measure conversions for specific time periods, such as quarters, then you would not have to worry about such questions. With Google analytics you can do just that.
I think you really need to understand why you are measuring. If all things remain constant, your product, your lead source(s), advertising, customers, season, etc., then it could all be lumped into one metric. However, it can be useful to compare metrics, particularly if your sales funnels are influenced by external or internal factors. If you don’t run comparisons, you can’t accurately know how effective your marketing is.
Thanks for this simple straight to the point breakdown. I’ve been looking for something like this for an hour! I’m just refining my business plan and trtying to work out metrics to set goals for conversions. This helped a lot!
Appreciate the work you put into this post,
Travis
You are most welcome Travis.
Hello Jordan,
Real Estate Sales
I’m trying to figure out which subdivision would be best to market to.
“The highest probability of an estimated return.”
Here’s the values I can collect for each subdivision
Total units in a subdivision.
total units sold over 12 months in the subdivision
Average sales value
Days on market before a sale.
Percentage of homes listed by a single agent in a subdivision
Percentage of homes sold by a buyers agent in a subdivision.
Gary,
That looks like an extremely complicated question. Like, if you had the answer, you could write an app and sell it.
I don’t know if this is nuts or not, but here’s what I might try if I were you. No idea if it would work, might need to be tweaked.
Give each criteria a weight, maybe 1-10. Like if sales value is pretty important, give it an 8, and if buyer’s agent is just a small thing, give it a 2.
Then, for simplicity’s sake, take the values that you pulled and sort them into buckets. For instance, if total units in subdivisions always falls between 10 and 200, then make a bucket for 0-50, 50-100, 100-150, 150-200. Each value needs to have the same number of buckets, and they need to be in order from worst to best. In this case bucket 1 is “0-50,” and bucket 4 is “150-200.”
Then, for each subdivision, go through the values and multiply the weight by the bucket. Add all of that together, and you’ve got a score for the subdivision, relative to all of the other subdivisions. Over time you can look at your returns and maybe tweak the scoring algorithm so it tracks more closely with past success.
This assumes that you know what values are good or bad, looks like you might have an idea – more units, higher price, faster sales all seem like good things for ROI. If you don’t know if lower total units is better or worse than higher total units for you to be successful, then algebra isn’t going to cut it. 🙂
I recently started with a new company as a remote sales trainer. We sell over the phone. Curious about figuring a closing average. They take every call regardless of scripted or not and use them to figure a conversion rate. I call those gross calls. I think it should be tabulated using only people you script. What are your thoughts on this?
I suppose it depends on what exactly you want to measure. If you’re measuring the effectiveness of a script versus no script, then I suppose I would agree with you. Assuming the leads are coming from the same source, it would be more useful to know what converts best.