Conversion rate is the simplest number in marketing and one of the easiest to get wrong. Below we show the formula, then work through seven real situations a coach or consultant runs into, from website visitors to paying clients, with every sum shown. You will also see how to solve for a missing number, the mistakes that skew the result, and what counts as good.
To calculate conversion rate, divide the number of conversions by the number of people who had the chance to convert, then multiply by 100. For example, if 800 people visit your landing page and 40 sign up, the conversion rate is 40 ÷ 800 × 100 = 5%.
Who this is for: Coaches, consultants and small business owners who want to work out their conversion rate for a page, a funnel step or a sales call without a spreadsheet degree.
The conversion rate formula is: conversion rate = (conversions ÷ total people who could convert) × 100. A conversion is whatever action you are counting: an enquiry, an opt-in, a booked call, a sale. The bottom number is everyone who had the chance to take that action in the same period.
So if 1,000 people land on your page in October and 30 of them book a call, the sum is 30 ÷ 1,000 = 0.03, and 0.03 × 100 = 3%. That is all there is to it. The hard part is not the maths, it is choosing the right top and bottom numbers.
Two rearrangements of the same formula answer the other questions people ask. Conversions = people × conversion rate tells you what to expect. People needed = conversions ÷ conversion rate tells you how much traffic or how many leads you need to hit a target.
If you would rather not do it by hand, our free conversion rate calculator does all three. Put in your numbers, pick what you are measuring, and it shows the rate, how it compares and what a better rate would be worth each month.
Each example below uses made-up but realistic numbers for a small coaching or consulting business. Swap in your own and the sums work the same way.
Your website had 2,400 visitors last month and 36 people filled in the contact form. The website conversion rate is 36 ÷ 2,400 = 0.015, and 0.015 × 100 = 1.5%.
This is the number most people mean by "website conversion rate". It is useful as a health check, but it mixes everyone together: people who came to read a blog post, people looking for your login page and people ready to hire you. If the figure feels low, look at the rate for your main service page on its own before you change anything.
You run a free guide on its own landing page. In 30 days, 800 people visited the page and 184 entered their email. The opt-in rate is 184 ÷ 800 = 0.23, so 0.23 × 100 = 23%.
Opt-in pages usually convert higher than a general website because they ask for one small thing and nothing else. That also means a high opt-in rate tells you little on its own. The real test is what happens to those 184 people next, which is the following example.
Of the 184 people who downloaded your guide, 22 booked a free call within the same month. Lead to call rate = 22 ÷ 184 = 0.1196, and 0.1196 × 100 = about 12%.
Round to one decimal place at most. Nobody makes a better decision because a rate is 11.96% rather than 12%. If this step is weak, it is often a follow-up problem rather than a page problem: people opted in, then heard nothing useful for a week.
Those 22 people booked calls, 18 actually turned up, and 6 became clients. You can work out two different rates here, and you should say which one you mean.
The gap between them is your no-show problem. The show-up rate is 18 ÷ 22 = 81.8%. If you only track the first figure, you will think your calls are going better than your diary says.
You send a launch email to 3,000 subscribers. 210 people click through to the sales page and 14 buy. Click to purchase rate = 14 ÷ 210 = 0.0667, so 6.7%.
Now measure the same 14 sales against everyone who got the email: 14 ÷ 3,000 = 0.0047, so 0.47%. Both are correct. The first tells you how well the sales page works for people who arrive. The second tells you how well the whole email did. If clicks are the weak point, our CTR calculator handles that step.
Your shop recorded 12,500 sessions in October and 275 orders. The ecommerce conversion rate is 275 ÷ 12,500 = 0.022, so 2.2%.
Notice the bottom number is sessions, not people. One shopper might visit four times before buying. If those 275 orders came from 250 different customers out of 9,800 users, the user-based rate is 250 ÷ 9,800 = 2.55%. Neither is wrong, but they are not interchangeable, and comparing one month's session rate with another month's user rate gives you nonsense.
This is the question in reverse. You know the rate and the total, and you want the conversions. Conversions = 450 × 20% = 450 × 0.20 = 90.
You can solve for any missing number with the same formula:
The "people needed" version is the one that changes plans. It turns "I want more clients" into a number of leads you can actually aim at.
Here are the same formulas side by side, using the numbers from the examples above. Each step's bottom number is the previous step's top number, which is what lets you see where people drop out.
| Funnel step | Formula | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Website visitors to enquiries | Enquiries ÷ visitors × 100 | 36 ÷ 2,400 = 1.5% |
| Landing page visitors to opt-ins | Opt-ins ÷ page visitors × 100 | 184 ÷ 800 = 23% |
| Leads to booked calls | Calls booked ÷ leads × 100 | 22 ÷ 184 = 12% |
| Booked calls to calls held (show-up rate) | Calls held ÷ calls booked × 100 | 18 ÷ 22 = 81.8% |
| Calls held to clients (close rate) | New clients ÷ calls held × 100 | 6 ÷ 18 = 33.3% |
| Email clicks to purchases | Purchases ÷ clicks × 100 | 14 ÷ 210 = 6.7% |
| Shop sessions to orders | Orders ÷ sessions × 100 | 275 ÷ 12,500 = 2.2% |
| Whole funnel (visitor to client) | New clients ÷ first-step visitors × 100 | 6 ÷ 800 = 0.75% |
The last row is worth a moment. A 23% opt-in rate looks great, a 33% close rate looks great, and yet fewer than 1 in 100 landing page visitors becomes a client. That is normal, and it is why one weak step in the middle costs so much. Our funnel leak calculator takes your numbers for each step and shows which one loses you the most clients.
Most bad conversion rates are not bad pages. They are bad sums. These are the mistakes we see most often when we look at someone's numbers.
Mixing sessions and users. Google Analytics 4 reports both, and they are different things. Google defines session key event rate as sessions in which a key event happened divided by total sessions, and user key event rate as users who performed a key event divided by total users (Google Analytics help). Pick one and stick with it month to month.
Using the wrong time window. Someone who opts in on 28 October may book a call on 3 November. If you divide November's calls by November's leads, you will undercount some months and overcount others. For slower steps like calls to clients, look at a 60 or 90 day window, or follow a group of leads from one month through to the end.
Counting duplicates and junk. The same person signing up twice, your own test submissions and spam form fills all inflate the top number. Clean the list before you divide. The same goes for the bottom number: if your own visits are not filtered out of analytics, your rate looks lower than it is.
Drawing conclusions from tiny numbers. Three sales from 50 visitors is 6%, and two sales would be 4%. One person changed your rate by a third. With small numbers, wait for more data before you rewrite a page.
Honestly, it depends on what you are measuring, who the traffic is and what you are asking for. A free guide and a £3,000 coaching programme should not convert at the same rate, and the same page will convert very differently for warm referral traffic and cold ad traffic.
One of the few large public datasets comes from Unbounce, which analysed 41,000 landing pages with 464 million visitors and found a median landing page conversion rate of 6.6% across all industries, using data from Q4 2024 (Unbounce). That is a median for landing pages built on one platform, not a target for your website, your sales calls or your shop.
The most useful benchmark is your own past. Work out each step's rate for the last three months, then aim to move the weakest one. A step that goes from 8% to 12% is a bigger win than any comparison with a stranger's average. Our guide on how to increase your conversion rate covers what to change first.
Start by writing down the numbers for each step of your funnel for one month: visitors, leads, calls booked, calls held, clients. Run them through the conversion rate calculator or the table above. You now have five or six rates instead of one vague feeling that "marketing isn't working".
Then look for the step with the biggest drop compared with your own past or with what you would expect. That is where to work. If people visit but do not opt in, it is usually the offer or the page. If they opt in but do not book, it is usually the follow-up. If they book but do not buy, it is the call or the price. Our guide on why your funnel isn't converting walks through each of these.
You can do all of this yourself with a spreadsheet and an hour a month. A done-for-you studio makes sense when you know which step is leaking but do not have the time to rebuild the page, the emails or the follow-up. At Unbury we find where your marketing is losing people, build the fix and run it week to week. Start with a free marketing audit and we will show you where the leak is first.
Divide the number of conversions by the number of people who had the chance to convert, then multiply by 100. If 50 people out of 1,000 visitors sign up, that is 50 ÷ 1,000 × 100 = 5%. Make sure both numbers come from the same time period.
There are 90 conversions. Multiply the number of leads by the rate as a decimal: 450 × 0.20 = 90. The same method works for any rate and total.
Divide the number of clients you want by your lead to client conversion rate. If you want 10 clients and 5% of leads become clients, you need 10 ÷ 0.05 = 200 leads. Use your real rate from the last few months, not a guess.
Either works, as long as you use the same one every time. Sessions count visits, so one person visiting three times counts three times. Users count people. Session-based rates are usually lower because the bottom number is bigger.
Conversion rate is the general term for any step, such as visitors to opt-ins. Close rate usually means the share of sales calls or proposals that become paying clients. It is a conversion rate for the final step of the funnel.
Send us your setup and we will tell you honestly where it is leaking customers and what to fix first. Free, no pitch.