Terms of Trade · Edition 2: The trading pack
Conversion rate
Definition
Orders divided by visits, expressed as a percentage. It reports the share of visitors who bought and says nothing about who the rest were or why they came.
Field note
Conversion rate is the metric that brand experience was abandoned for.
Board question
What did the visitors who did not buy come for, and did the site give it to them?
Applied through
The Review measures against conversion alongside traffic, order value, margin and repeat, which is the only way the number means anything; Customer Truth in the Cat’s Whiskers asks who the visitors actually were.
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