What is a Conversion?

A conversion only counts if you've defined it. Visitors take dozens of actions on any site, but a conversion is the specific action you've decided is valuable and chosen to measure. Some conversions matter more than others.

Macro and micro conversions

• Macro conversions complete a primary business goal directly: a finished purchase, a submitted lead form, a completed event registration, or a new account.
• Micro conversions are the smaller steps that come first: adding a product to the cart, starting checkout, signing up for a newsletter, or visiting a pricing page.

Track micro conversions when macro conversions are too rare to show movement. Nielsen Norman Group reported in July 2024 that the average macro-conversion rate across several industries is only 2.9%, so a change that nudges purchases up a fraction of a percent can be hard to see. Micro conversions happen far more often, which makes them the better gauge of incremental improvements.

How conversion rate works

Conversion rate is the percentage of visitors who complete a desired action. For example, if 100 people visit your website and 10 fill out a form, your conversion rate is 10%.

There's no universal "good" conversion rate. That 2.9% cross-industry average is a fair reference point, but rates vary widely by industry, device, and traffic source. The most useful benchmark is your own history: if 2% of visitors converted last quarter and 2.5% convert this quarter, you're improving.

Tracking conversions in Google Analytics

In Google Analytics 4, you track a conversion by marking the event that measures your desired action as a key event: create or identify the event, then flag it on the Key events page in Admin. (Google renamed on-site conversions to "key events" in March 2024; in Analytics, a "conversion" now means a key event shared with Google Ads for ad-campaign measurement.)

Reports like Landing pages and User acquisition then include a Key events column showing how many times visitors completed the action, and the session key event rate metric turns those counts into a percentage. For the full setup, follow our guide to creating events and measuring conversions in GA4.

Improving your conversion rate

The practice of improving conversions is called conversion rate optimization (CRO). Website design, copywriting, user experience, and the value of your offer all move the number, and even a small lift compounds: at 10,000 visitors a month, going from a 2% to a 3% conversion rate means 100 extra conversions.

Start with one page that gets real traffic and has a clear goal, measure its current rate, and test one change at a time. Our roundup of 23 techniques and tools to improve website conversion rates is a good source for that first test.