Recommended research
Conversion Rate Optimization Report 2012
This is the fourth annual Econsultancy Conversion Rate Optimization Report, in association with RedEye. The research looks at the types of conversion and measurement used, as well as tools, strategies and processes employed for improving conversion rates. The report also examines different areas of best practice and identifies which techniques and methods are most valuable for improving conversion rates.
Researcher at Wheel
04 September 2003 14:11pm
Hello
I have read your Marketing Benchmarks document and found it has become essential for my work. I was wondering if anyone has figures for Travel sites conversion rates.
I guess they could been seen as a retailer and thus apply retail conversion rates, but it would be great if anyone has rough figures i can appy. many thanks
Director of Licensing and Partnerships at Fodor's
05 September 2003 11:45am
Of the speakers I have hear at various travel conferences in recent years most talk of conversion rates between 5 and 15%. The marketing medium, relevance, content, degree of personalisation are all key drivers in getting these rates up.
The most (practially unbelievable) rate I have heard mentioned was by the VP MArketing of Travelcoity US who presented at the Eye4Travel in Vegas this year. They used tailored email marketing to their registered users. By knowing the location and interests of the user they were able to dynamically generate marketing emails with offers only outbound from their local airports and holiday types eg. adventure featured more heavily if they had opt-in preference or monitoring previous purchase or viewing patterns. He claimed to have aorund a 40% open rate on the mail and 40% conversion.
Lastminute are also very advanced in profiling the customer to ensure the newsletters are properyl targetted to get conversion rates up.
Director at Purple Spinnaker
05 September 2003 15:07pm
With respect to travel site statistics, it takes a bit of effor to find out much as most travel companies do not openly state what these are, also I suspect each company has a different way of measuring conversion.
If you look at Lastminute.com, the had 7.5m email subscribers and 358,000 customers who purchased 994,000 products in their in there 3rd quarter. So is there conversion the number of customers or the number of products purchased - which equates to either 4.7% conversion rate or 13.25%.
If you look at this on a quarter by quarter basis, then you will see that in 2003 LMC grew their subscriber base from 6.8m to 7m to 7.5m in this year, and in their customers were 204k, 303k, 358k, purchasing 570k, 712k and 994k products so over three quarters they have had customer conversion rates of 3%, 4.3% and 4.7% and product conversion rates of: 8.3%, 10.1% and 13.25% respectively. OR you could state that from 7.5m subscribers they have converted 901k customers in 9 months giving them a conversion rate of 12% and sold 2276k products equating to a product conversion rate of 30.3%. So I think it will all come down to what you count as conversion really.
If you are looking to actually carry out more of this type of work then you will have to trail through the investor presentations or annual reports of the publicly traded companies and then look at these basic figures: number of subscribers, number of customers and number of products sold.
I would be interested in what you find out or if you want some more help drop me a line through here.
Fndr at Majestic12.co.uk
05 September 2003 15:25pm
I'd aslways ask about methodology used to calculated conversion - variance is huge! The following may affect conversion significantly:
* is it unique visitors or visits (sessions) or something else
* how the above terms are actually defined: IPs, logged in users etc
* what is considered a transaction: all placed, after fraud check, actually shipped, not returned & refunded etc
I would not trust a single figure on its own from source who has self-interest in making sure that this figure looks the most beneficial way for that source.
My current preference is as follows:
Conversion = Placed Orders / Unique Visitors * 100%
Unique visitors are unique combination of IP + OS + Browser