What is conversion rate, and how is it measured?
Conversion rate is the share of visits or visitors that complete a goal, a sale, a lead, a signup. It is one of the most quoted metrics in marketing, and also one of the most misread, because how you count the top and bottom of the fraction changes the answer.
The basic formula
Conversion rate is conversions divided by a base, times 100. A shop with 50 orders from 2,000 sessions has a 2.5% session conversion rate. Simple, until you ask what the base should be.
Session rate vs user rate
- Session conversion rate: conversions per session. Good for measuring on-site effectiveness of a single visit.
- User conversion rate: conversions per user, which can be higher, since one user may take several sessions to convert.
GA4 can show both, so a report that looks "wrong" is often just measuring the other one, a cousin of mixing up sessions and engaged sessions.
How tracking skews it
Your conversion rate is only as honest as your tracking. If bot traffic or staging visits inflate the base, the rate looks too low. If a conversion fires on every page or you double-count, it looks impossibly high, see conversion rate too high. Clean tracking first, then trust the rate.
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