Conversion rate calculator
Work out your conversion rate, and the traffic you would need to hit a target. Free, no account, and every number stays in your browser.
- Free, no account
- Runs in your browser
- Nothing is sent to us
Your numbers
Visitors or sessions over the period you are measuring.
Signups, purchases, or whatever counts as the goal.
Optional. How many conversions you want, to work backwards to the traffic needed.
Enter visitors and conversions. Both stay in your browser.
The formula
conversion rate = (conversions / visitors) × 100That is the whole thing. Two hundred signups from five thousand visitors is 4%.
The calculator also runs it backwards: given your current rate and a target number of conversions, it tells you how much traffic you would need at that same rate. That is the more useful direction when you are planning, and the one people do wrong in their heads.
Define the two numbers before you divide them
The formula is trivial. Almost every wrong conversion rate comes from an inconsistent numerator or denominator.
Pick visitors or sessions and stay there. One person visiting four times before buying is one visitor and four sessions. The same purchase gives you two very different rates depending on which you divide by. Neither is wrong; switching between them silently is.
Define the conversion precisely. “Signup” might mean the form submitted, the email verified, or the first login. These produce different numbers, and the gap between them is often the most interesting thing you could measure.
Match the windows. Visitors this month against conversions this month is fine. Visitors this month against conversions ever is not, and it is a surprisingly common mistake in spreadsheets.
Read the rate next to the count
A conversion rate on its own is close to meaningless, because it moves for two opposite reasons:
- The numerator went up. Good.
- The denominator went down. Usually not good.
A rate rising from 2% to 3% while conversions fall from 200 to 150 is a site getting worse, reported as an improvement. Always put the absolute count next to the rate. This calculator shows both for that reason.
Segment before you optimise
A single site-wide rate hides everything you would act on. The same site can run at 8% for returning visitors from your newsletter and 0.4% for cold paid search, and the blended number tells you to fix neither.
Worth splitting by, roughly in order of how often it changes the answer:
- Channel. Paid, organic, email and direct convert very differently, and the mix shifts week to week.
- Landing page. The page that gets the visit is usually the biggest single lever.
- New against returning. Most purchases happen on a later visit, which makes first-visit rates look worse than the funnel actually is.
- Device. A mobile rate well below desktop is nearly always a fixable form problem.
Then stop calculating it by hand
If you are pasting numbers into a calculator, you are working from an export, which means you are working from last week. sonex computes conversion rate live against any goal or funnel step, split by channel, page, device and campaign, without cookies and without a consent banner.
If you are also buying traffic, the ad cost calculator turns the same numbers into cost per acquisition.
Frequently asked.
- How do you calculate conversion rate?
- Divide conversions by visitors and multiply by 100. Two hundred signups from five thousand visitors is a 4% conversion rate. The only hard part is being consistent about what counts as a visitor and what counts as a conversion.
- Should I use visitors or sessions as the denominator?
- Either works as long as you never switch. Sessions usually give a lower rate because one person can visit several times before converting. Visitors answer "what share of people convert", sessions answer "what share of visits convert". Pick the one that matches your question and label it.
- What is a good conversion rate?
- There is no useful universal benchmark, because the number depends entirely on what you count as a conversion. A newsletter signup and an enterprise purchase are both conversions with wildly different expected rates. Compare against your own previous number, measured the same way.
- Why does my conversion rate go up when traffic drops?
- Usually because the traffic you lost was the least qualified. A rate is a ratio, so removing poorly-matched visitors raises it without anything improving. Always read conversion rate next to the absolute conversion count.
- Can a conversion rate be over 100%?
- Only if you are counting multiple conversions per visitor, such as several purchases from one person. This calculator assumes one conversion per visitor and flags the case where conversions exceed visitors, because it usually means the two inputs were swapped.