Conversion Rate Benchmarks by Industry: 1.74% or 6.6%?

Look up the average conversion rate and nearly every source gives you a different answer. Unbounce’s 2024 Conversion Benchmark Report puts the median landing page rate at 6.6% across 41,000 pages. Shogun’s H1 2026 data has the median Shopify store at 1.74%. One divides by landing page visitors and the other by sessions, which explains most of the gap.

Conversion rate benchmarks by industry are meant to cut through that. They show what share of visits ends in a purchase, signup, form fill or call within one vertical, so you measure yourself against direct peers and not a blended all-sites average. Ecommerce stores and SaaS companies use them, and so do lead-generation sites, each comparing against the cohort it actually competes with.

How Conversion Rate Is Calculated and What Counts as a Conversion

The formula is conversions divided by sessions or visitors, multiplied by 100. Unbounce gives 50 signups from 1,000 visitors as its example, which works out to 5%.

Where it gets messy is what goes into the numerator and, even more, the denominator.

Which denominator a benchmark uses

• Shogun (H1 2026) divides orders by sessions, so a shopper who visits three times and buys once counts as 3 sessions and 1 order.
• Unbounce (2024 report) takes total conversions over total visitors to landing pages.
• Contentsquare divides sessions that include a conversion goal by total sessions.
• WordStream (2026) goes with conversions per ad click.

GA4 sits closest to the session model. Google Analytics Help describes a key event as an event you mark as important to the business, and the rate built on it is the session key event rate (sessions with at least one key event divided by all sessions, as of October 2026).

A lead form only shows up in that rate once the submission is marked as a key event, so tracking form submissions in Google Analytics has to be set up before any comparison is worth making.

With IvyForms, the simplest setup is a dedicated thank-you page. In the confirmation settings, choose redirect to page, then mark the visit to that page as a key event in GA4. The thank-you URL then counts only completed submissions, one URL per form.

The same submissions also appear as entries in your WordPress dashboard. The Entries column in All Forms shows the count per form, and the entries table filters by date range, so you can check GA4’s numerator against a second source.

Conversion types and what each divides by

Comparing a trial signup rate to a purchase rate says nothing about performance. Match the conversion type before anything else.

Free Form Conversion Rate Calculator

Why Do Published Conversion Rate Averages Disagree?

Mostly it comes down to what each source divides by. Some use sessions, others landing page visitors or ad clicks. The samples differ as well (Shopify stores in one case, landing pages or paid campaigns in others), and some sources report a median where others report a mean. Here are four of the big ones side by side.

These aren’t four estimates of one number. Shogun’s median describes a typical Shopify store. WordStream’s describes a typical paid search campaign, which is a different animal entirely.

Mean versus median

Unbounce uses medians for most of its figures because the definition of a conversion varies so much between pages and industries that outliers distort a mean. Some channel and device figures in its report are averages, though, so check how each one is labeled. WordStream uses medians too and says so in its methodology note, even when the headlines say “average”.

Shogun reports both, and its mean runs well above its median because a long tail of high converters pulls it up. If you want to compare a typical business, go with the median.

Session-based versus landing page benchmarks

A landing page exists to get one action. Its visitors are pre-selected.

A sitewide session also includes browsing visits from people with no intent to buy or sign up, so a sitewide rate will sit lower than a landing page rate for the same business.

Check the report edition before quoting a figure

Contentsquare’s 46 billion session sample belongs to its 2022 edition. The 2026 edition covers 99 billion sessions across 6,500+ websites and reports conversion rate down 5.1% year over year.

Some 2026 roundups still pair the older sample size with newer-looking averages, so confirm which edition a number came from before it goes into a target.

Ecommerce Conversion Rate Benchmarks by Industry

Repeat-purchase, lower-ticket categories convert best, and considered-purchase categories convert worst. Shogun’s H1 2026 data from 745 active Shopify stores shows a 2.7x spread between health and wellness and sports and outdoors.

All of these figures come from Shogun’s H1 2026 data, with orders divided by sessions.

Health and wellness leads, with beauty and personal care and food and beverage close behind. These are repeat-purchase categories, and customers self-select before they arrive. Down at the bottom (sports, autos, electronics) you find considered purchases, where shoppers compare, leave and return.

Shopify store benchmarks

Shogun only counted stores with at least one order and one session in the period, and it threw out anything converting below 0.1% or above 25%. Industry labels come from Storeleads data, a third-party estimate.

The filters make the sample cleaner and narrower. A store sitting below 0.1% has no peer in this dataset.

Dynamic Yield’s rolling twelve-month benchmark is wider and puts food and beverage at 6.51% against 0.93% for home and furniture. The cohorts differ, so the gap shows how much the category label and sample change the answer, not that one source is wrong.

Add-to-cart and checkout benchmarks

Cart abandonment runs from 56.58% in pet care and veterinary services to 80.08% in luxury and jewelry, according to Dynamic Yield’s rolling twelve-month data.

Add-to-cart rate is one of the micro conversions worth benchmarking next to the final purchase rate.

A store with a normal purchase rate and an abnormal abandonment rate has a checkout problem, and checkout optimization is the place to start.

Lead Generation, SaaS and Service Industry Benchmarks

Lead-driven industries measure a form fill, trial signup or call rather than a purchase, so their published rates sit on a different scale from ecommerce and cannot be compared with it directly.

Finance shows the sharpest split. Unbounce’s financial services landing pages convert at 8.3%, while WordStream’s finance and insurance search ads convert at 2.64%.

Same vertical, different measuring point. One counts landing page visitors, the other paid clicks.

To compare your own lead form against these rates, divide the submissions by the visitors to that page. On a WordPress site, the submissions come from the entries count for that form, and the visitors from your analytics. One form per offer keeps each rate separate, and every entry stores the Source URL of the page it came from.

For a quick visual, the wpDataTables integration turns entries into tables and charts. Choose only non-personal fields, since those tables display on the front end.

SaaS funnel stages

SaaS funnels get measured at visitor to lead, free trial to paid, and demo request, and the 3.8% landing page median only covers the first of those.

Teams working on generating leads for SaaS should benchmark each stage against its own peer rate, not against one blended number.

Legal, healthcare and other service industries

Physicians and dentists land in the upper third of WordStream’s 2026 category list for search conversion rate.

Legal is the opposite case. Attorneys and legal services carry the highest cost per click in the same dataset yet convert below the all-industry median, so the number only helps once the team agrees on what counts as a lead (see how law firms approach lead generation).

How Conversion Rate Changes by Traffic Channel and Device

Channel and device each split one site’s rate into very different numbers, so a blended rate hides the segment that is actually underperforming.

• Email is the highest-converting channel for ecommerce pages in Unbounce’s 2024 report (data from July 2023 to July 2024), at a 28.6% median. Entertainment is higher at 46.2%, driven largely by sweepstakes pages.
• Instagram is the top social result for financial services in that same Unbounce report, with a 15.5% median.
• Paid search converts at 4x the rate of paid social (Contentsquare 2024 benchmark).
• Professional services pages convert 40% better on desktop yet draw over 4x more traffic from mobile (Unbounce 2024).
• Mobile accounts for 74.67% of ecommerce traffic against 23.67% for desktop (Dynamic Yield, trailing twelve months).

Conversion rate by traffic channel

Channel rates only mean something against the right denominator. Google Ads reports per click, GA4 per session.

WordStream’s 2026 benchmarks put the median Google and Microsoft Ads conversion rate at 8.18%, with category results from 2.64% (finance and insurance) to 16.22% (animals and pets).

In GA4, add the session default channel group as a dimension next to session key event rate to see the same split for your own traffic.

Conversion rate by device

Mobile carries roughly three quarters of ecommerce traffic, so the blended rate is mostly a mobile rate.

A desktop-heavy benchmark misleads a mobile-heavy store. Compare device by device.

Long lead forms are a common weak spot on phones, which is where best practices for mobile forms come in. A responsive form adapts to phones, tablets and desktops, and multi-page forms split a long form into short steps with a progress bar, which suits small screens.

What Is a Good Conversion Rate Compared With a Top Performer?

Good, in practice, means the top-quartile floor of your own industry. Not the median, and not an all-site figure. Unbounce defines it as the 75th percentile, the rate a page has to beat to outperform 75% of its peers.

• Across industries, “good” ranges from 11.4% to 40.8% (Unbounce Conversion Benchmark Report, 2024).
• Ecommerce landing pages have a 4.2% median and an 11.4% top-quartile floor.
• Professional services sit at a 6.1% median with a 14.1% top-quartile floor.
• For Shopify stores, the middle 50% convert between 0.88% and 3.39% (Shogun, H1 2026).

Shogun also has a milestone rule. Stores below 1% should aim for the industry median. Between 1% and 3%, the target is the industry 75th percentile. Past 3%, attention moves to order value and lifetime value.

Put the Unbounce and Shogun numbers side by side and the label stops travelling. The ecommerce landing page floor is more than three times the top edge of the Shopify middle band.

Both are “good” inside their own sample.

Where the top-performer label comes from

It is a percentile cutoff, not a universal standard. Unbounce publishes the 75th percentile for landing pages, and Shogun publishes an upper-quartile threshold for store-level rates.

Roundups also circulate a top-10% rate, but neither Unbounce nor Shogun publishes one in the sources checked here. Treat those figures as unverified.

The cutoff bends with the conversion action too. Unbounce notes that its highest floor, in entertainment (40.8%), is heavily influenced by sweepstakes pages where entering an email counts as the conversion.

Set the next milestone, not the ceiling

Chasing the top-quartile number from a standing start wastes quarters. Reach the industry median first, then the 75th percentile, as Shogun advises for stores.

The milestone only holds when both numbers come from the same industry cohort and the same conversion definition.

What Causes Conversion Rates to Differ Between Industries?

Mostly price, urgency, traffic mix and page type. An industry label is shorthand for how those pile up.

Price point and average order value

Home and furniture carries the highest average order value in Dynamic Yield’s rolling twelve-month data at $347, against $75 for beauty and personal care. It is also the category sitting at the bottom of that dataset’s conversion ranking.

Unbounce makes the same point with a single rate. It looks weak on a newsletter signup page and solid on a low-ticket product page, but excellent on the sales page of an expensive product.

A higher price means longer deliberation and a lower rate. Shogun adds that higher order values partly compensate for lower conversion in considered-purchase categories.

Urgency and sales cycle

Repair and maintenance pages convert almost 3x better than home renovation pages, per Unbounce’s 2024 data. A broken pipe gets fixed now. A kitchen remodel can wait, so visitors research and compare, then leave.

Software sits in the waiting camp too, since Unbounce notes that SaaS pages promote complex products with longer sales cycles and attract visitors with widely varying buying intent.

Traffic mix and visitor intent

• Returning visitors convert at 2.9% against 1.7% for new visitors (Contentsquare 2026 benchmark), so a site’s blended rate shifts with its visitor mix.
• Shogun says a campaign bringing in more cold paid-social traffic lowers a store’s rate with no change to the site.
• Monthly aggregate conversion drifts with the season even in a stable cohort, according to the same Shogun analysis.

A falling rate during a paid push is not a site defect on its own.

Page type

Homepages try to serve everyone, while a landing page asks for one thing, and the gap between a homepage and a landing page shows up in the rate even inside a single industry.

The weight of the ask matters too. Unbounce points out that sweepstakes pages request an email while streaming pages request card details, and their medians sit far apart.

Which Benchmark Should You Compare Your Conversion Rate Against?

Pick a benchmark built on the same conversion definition and the same industry cohort, with a similar channel and device mix, and use the median instead of the mean. Working through it in order looks like this.

1. Match the conversion definition: purchase, lead form, trial signup, demo request or call.
2. Match the denominator, whether that’s sessions, landing page visitors or ad clicks.
3. Pick the cohort closest to your price point and sales cycle, and not only your vertical label.
4. Use the median as the baseline and the 75th percentile as the stretch target.
5. Pull your own rate for the same period from Google Analytics 4 and split it by channel and device.
6. Before the number goes into a target, check the benchmark’s sample, period and report edition.

When two benchmarks give opposite answers

Financial services shows how the choice flips a conclusion. Unbounce reports that mobile landing pages convert 27.8% better than desktop in the industry, while Contentsquare’s 2026 benchmark has desktop at 3.4% against 2.0% for mobile.

The samples differ. Unbounce measures campaign landing pages, while Contentsquare takes in all sessions on financial services sites.

Pick the one that matches the page you are judging.

Diagnosing a gap before changing anything

Start with the numbers. Segment your own rate by channel and device to see whether the shortfall is concentrated in one place.

Then look at behavior. Microsoft Clarity is free and offers session recordings and heatmaps, and it added funnels on June 3, 2024.

If the recordings show visitors starting a form and leaving, work on form abandonment before touching copy or layout.

IvyForms has several levers for exactly that case, and each is a setting, not a rebuild.

• Conditional logic hides follow-up fields until an earlier answer calls for them, so the visible form stays short.
• Multi-page forms and conversational forms break a long form into steps or one question at a time.
• Custom required messages, and a scroll to the first field in error, make a failed submission easier to fix.
• Spam protection with reCAPTCHA, Turnstile or hCaptcha keeps junk entries out of your lead count, so the rate reflects real people.

Testing the fix

Optimizely’s documentation shows how many visitors a test needs and, as of October 2026, declares a winner at a 90% significance level by default. Platforms like Optimizely and VWO only protect you if you wait.

Moho Internet Concepts tested a shorter banner on its Horloges.nl G-SHOCK page that added a 2-year guarantee next to the “Official Dealer” claim. It saw little lift in month one, held out for significance, and reached a 41% revenue increase after two months, according to VWO’s case study.

Buyakilt.com tested a product filter on its category pages and recorded 26% more conversions, per VWO.

When the gap sits in a lead form, start with ways to increase form conversions before testing page layout.

For form tests, change one thing per version, such as the number of fields or the button label. Because entries are kept per form, a duplicate form with one change gives a clean entry count to compare against the original over the same period.

When a Gap to Benchmark Is Not a Problem

Sometimes the rate is just a poor measure of the business, and a gap means very little.

• A store near its category median that earns well per visitor, thanks to healthy order value and repeat purchases, has nothing to fix.
• A lower rate can still mean better leads when those leads are high value, which Unbounce itself cautions about in its report guidance.
• Your sample may simply be too small to compare.
• Or a traffic shift explains the dip.

Lead value over lead volume

WordStream notes that in many industries advertisers run campaigns with a high cost per lead and still turn a profit.

For lead generation, read the rate next to the other lead generation KPIs to track, such as cost per lead and lead quality.

A qualifying question on the form can raise lead quality at the cost of volume. A Dropdown for budget or timeline, plus smart logic on notifications, routes high-value submissions to the right person first.

Small samples and low baselines

Optimizely’s documentation states that low baseline conversion rates lengthen the time to reach statistical significance, and that smaller improvements need larger samples.

A low-traffic site with a low rate sees month-to-month swings that are mostly noise. Comparing that number to a benchmark built on thousands of sites proves little.

Mix shifts and the typical-site trap

Check the traffic mix before acting. A dip that coincides with a new paid campaign points at the audience, not the site.

And matching the median only proves you are typical. It says nothing about whether the experience is good.

Common Questions About Conversion Rate Benchmarks by Industry

How do I improve my conversion rate once I know where I stand?

Start with the segment that sits furthest below its peer median, usually one channel or one device. Then change one element per test and run it to statistical significance.

A benchmark shows where to look. It does not say which change to make.

What is the difference between a micro conversion and a macro conversion?

Macro is the main goal, whether that’s a purchase, a trial signup or a demo request. Micro conversions are the steps on the way there, like an add to cart or a form start.

Most industry benchmarks publish the macro rate. Add-to-cart is one of the few micro rates with published category figures, from Dynamic Yield.

Is cart abandonment the same as a low conversion rate?

No. Cart abandonment tracks shoppers who added items and left, while conversion rate counts every session that ends in an order, including visits that never reached a cart.

A store can sit at a normal rate and still lose revenue at checkout.

How much traffic do I need before comparing my rate to a benchmark?

No fixed threshold exists. You need enough conversions that a single extra sale does not visibly move your rate.

For a test, Optimizely’s sample size calculator turns your baseline rate and the lift you want to detect into a required visitor count.

Do conversion rate benchmarks differ by country?

Yes, the samples behind them differ. WordStream’s 2026 search ad benchmarks, for example, cover US campaigns only.

Check the geography of the sample before applying any rate to a store that sells in another market.

How can I count form conversions on a WordPress site?

Use two sources. Set the form’s confirmation to redirect to a thank-you page and mark that page as a GA4 key event, then compare it with the entry count in your form plugin.

If the two numbers differ a lot, check for spam entries or an ad blocker hiding the thank-you page view. The plugin documentation has a guide for each setting mentioned here.

How Often to Re-Check an Industry Benchmark Comparison

Conversion rate benchmarks by industry need a fresh comparison whenever the publisher issues a new edition, or your conversion definition, traffic mix or device split changes. An old comparison then measures a different thing.

Categories move faster than annual reports. Shogun’s same-store data shows industry conversion rates swinging from +22.6% for food and beverage to -10.0% for toys and hobbies between Q1 and Q2 2026.

Check the conversion definition and denominator first, since a change there breaks comparability outright. Channel and visitor mix come next, then device split, because those only shift the rate.

Switching benchmark sources resets your trend line, so run the old and new comparison side by side for one period. This position was verified in October 2026.

A monthly note of each form’s entry count, taken from the form entries table, gives you your own trend line to hold against any new edition.

When the gap sits in a lead form on a landing page, the next step is working through best practices for landing page forms.