What a normal view-to-buyer rate looks like, source by source

Somebody in a comment section will tell you the number is two per cent. Somebody else will say five. A third person will quote a study about online retail that has nothing to do with a creator selling a £40 course from a link in a bio. You can spend a week looking for the correct benchmark and come away with less clarity than you started with, because the honest answer is that the useful benchmark is your own.

Why external benchmarks mislead

A conversion rate is a ratio between two numbers you have chosen how to define. Views can mean sessions, unique visitors, or page loads including your own. Buyers can mean orders, customers, or customers net of refunds. Two people quoting three per cent may be measuring entirely different things, and neither of them is selling what you sell to the people you sell it to.

Price changes the ratio more than almost anything else. A £5 download and a £400 coaching package will never convert at similar rates, and they should not. The £400 product converting at a fraction of a per cent may be producing more money than the £5 product converting at eight per cent. Any benchmark that ignores price is comparing the wrong thing.

There is also a genuine difficulty with small numbers. If a source sent 60 views and produced 2 buyers, your rate is 3.3 per cent, but one extra sale would have made it 5 per cent. At creator scale, a great many of these figures are within touching distance of noise, and pretending otherwise leads to confident decisions built on nothing.

Chasing an average versus reading your own spread

The shift is from looking outward for a target to looking sideways across your own channels. Your sources are the only fair comparison group you have, because they share your prices, your products and your writing.

Working out the numbers

Use a full calendar month, not a week, and use the same month boundaries every time. If you launched something, note it on the sheet, because launches distort everything around them.

1. 1Open Analytics and record storefront views for the month, split by traffic source.
2. 2Record buyers and revenue for the same month. If you sell several products, do this per product as well as in total.
3. 3For each source, divide buyers by views and multiply by 100. That is your rate for that source, expressed as a percentage.
4. 4For each source, also divide revenue by views and multiply by 100. That gives revenue per hundred views, which is the number that actually pays your rent.
5. 5Write down the median of your source rates. That is your house benchmark for the quarter.
6. 6Flag any source that is more than a third below the median and has sent at least 200 views, because that is the one worth investigating.
7. 7Repeat next month and compare against your own previous figures rather than against anyone else's.

The comparison that changes a decision

Imagine a month with three labelled sources. Short-form video sends 1,400 views and produces 14 buyers of a £12 product: a 1 per cent rate and £168, which is £12 per hundred views. Search sends 300 views and produces 6 buyers, mostly of a £60 course: a 2 per cent rate and around £300, which is £100 per hundred views. The newsletter sends 90 views and produces 3 buyers of the £180 coaching block: a 3.3 per cent rate and £540, which is £600 per hundred views.

The channel sending the fewest people is producing the most money by a wide margin. Nothing about this is a promise, and your own spread will look different, but the arithmetic is the point: judged on views, the newsletter looks like a rounding error. Judged on revenue per hundred views, it is the business. Read both columns before you decide where your Tuesday goes. The analytics view gives you views, buyers and revenue in one place so the sums take minutes.

The mistake most people make

The common error is trying to lift the conversion rate on the channel with the most views, because that is where the upside looks biggest. Usually that channel is low intent by nature, and pushing its rate from 0.8 per cent to 1 per cent is an enormous amount of work for a modest gain. The faster win is almost always to send more people down the path that already converts well, which often means writing to your own list rather than making another video.

The second error is optimising the rate while ignoring the checkout. If people are arriving with intent and not buying, look at the page before you look at the traffic: a clear price, an honest description, and a product that delivers immediately. Instant delivery to a private order page is standard on store.fan, and you can see how the rest of the buying flow works on the features page or in the FAQ.

Stop asking whether your rate is good. Ask which of your own sources is above your own median, and what it would take to send more people through that door. That is a question with an answer, and the answer changes every quarter.