Demand and conversion
Conversion rate
The share of a defined population that completed a defined action — meaningless until both the population and the action are stated.
Also called CR · Конверсия
Formula
CR = Completions ÷ Eligible population
- Completions
- one named action, deduplicated by person rather than by event
- Eligible population
- everyone who could have completed it, over the same window
The denominator is where nearly all of the error lives. Sessions, users, visitors to the site, visitors to the page and people who reached the step are five different numbers, and the same business can report conversion rates that differ by a factor of four across them without anyone lying.
Conversion is a ratio between two decisions, and the second decision — what goes in the denominator — is the one that determines whether the number can be acted on. Rate per session answers a media question. Rate per user answers a demand question. Rate per person who reached the step answers a product question. Reporting one and discussing another is the most common analytical error in commercial work.
The window matters as much as the population. A user who visits on Monday and buys on Thursday counts as a conversion under a user-level definition with a thirty-day window, and as two non-converting sessions under a session-level one. Neither is wrong; mixing them within one report is.
- Sessions
- 48,000
- Unique users
- 31,000
- Users who viewed a product
- 12,400
- Users who began checkout
- 1,950
- Orders
- 620
Per session 1.3 %, per user 2.0 %, per product viewer 5.0 %, per checkout starter 31.8 %. Every one is correct. Only the last says anything about the checkout, and only the first two can be compared with last month if the traffic mix moved.
A conversion rate that falls after a successful awareness campaign has usually not got worse — the campaign added top-of-funnel traffic to the denominator. Segment by intent before concluding anything, and never compare a blended rate across periods where the traffic mix changed.
Quantities derived from the counts. Each is only as sound as the definitions beneath it.
Cannot be computed without
- Session, user, event
- The three units analytics counts in, each measuring something different and none of them a person.
- Lead
- A contact who has given permission to be contacted about a specific thing. Not a customer, not a prospect, and not a metric a business should be run on.
The term is a reading taken at a point in a sequence that is already running. These are the sequences, with the place each of them jams.
- From an enquiry arriving to somebody answering it
- A message from a person who might buy, travelling from the form they filled to somebody who can actually answer what they asked. 6 steps, one inbox per channel, and a person per inbox is the arrangement that fails while looking reasonable.
Knowing the definition is not the same as being able to check the figure. These are the procedures that do the second thing.
- Testing a growth number you were given
- “Conversion is up 6.4×. Revenue grew 40%. Abandoned carts down 65%.” · 30 minutes, 5 questions.
A definition proves nothing. These are the places on this site where this quantity was actually computed, with the period and whose figure it is stated beside each one.
94% of candidates submitted were accepted at first submission — the population is submitted candidates, the action is acceptance without a second round, and the count is ours rather than the accepting companies'. The 2% it is set against is what the conventional route was understood to yield at the time; nobody sampled it, and the record publishes it as an estimate rather than a baseline.
$230 to place an engineer, not $3,000 · 31 July 2025 · our measurement
2.3% before, 17% after, over the two months following relaunch. The operator’s own analytics, published as the pair rather than as a multiple because the multiple was ambiguous; Data Nexus has not verified it independently.
Enterprise E-commerce Recovery & Data-Driven Rebuild · 31 December 2024 · the client’s own figure, not verified by us
A definition is free. Being answerable for the figure it produces is the part that is bought, and this term is a working part of the engagements below.
- Taking a product into a new market
- A campaign can only sell what the market is allowed to buy.
- From idea to a product that exists
- Find the assumption that kills it, and test that one first.
- UX, UI and user flows
- Model states, don’t multiply screens.
The definitions are the easy part. Whether the figure on your dashboard was computed this way is a different question, and usually the more expensive one.