What is a conversion rate?
The share of visitors who do the thing the page is for: enquire, book, buy. The number that turns traffic into a business result, and the one paid media lives or dies on.
A conversion is whatever you want a visitor to do: call, fill in a form, book, or buy. Your conversion rate is how many visitors do it, divided by how many visitors you had. A hundred visitors and three enquiries is a conversion rate of three per cent.
It is the number that decides whether marketing makes money. Double your traffic and you might double your enquiries. Double your conversion rate and you get the same result without paying for a single extra visitor. That is why improving it, conversion rate optimisation, is usually the cheapest growth a business can find.
It only means something if it is tracked properly. Plenty of accounts count page views, button clicks or visits to the contact page as conversions, which makes the numbers look healthy while the phone does not ring. A conversion should be something that is worth money to the business, and it should be counted once.
Paid media measured on what it returns, not what it spends.
Google, Meta, LinkedIn and TikTok campaigns built on search terms, creative testing and conversion tracking, not impressions.