{
  "slug": "conversion-rate",
  "name": "Conversion rate",
  "aliases": [
    "CVR"
  ],
  "definition": "The share of visitors who converted against your configured goals in the period.",
  "category": "Web analytics and conversions",
  "type": "rate",
  "unit": "fraction of users (stored 0 to 1, shown as a percent)",
  "direction": "higher-better",
  "verification": "verified",
  "calculation": "Conversions divided by users, with a null guard on the denominator: `1.0 * conversions / NULLIF(users, 0)`. The denominator is not a sum, users is an approximate distinct count, a HyperLogLog estimate over the per-row visitor sketches with nulls read as zero, so the rate is conversions per estimated distinct person.",
  "numerator": "Conversions against configured goals over the period",
  "denominator": "Distinct users over the period, as a sketch-based approximate distinct count rather than a summed column",
  "aggregation": "A ratio, recomputed at the queried grain. Averaging per-page rates does not reproduce the site rate.",
  "grain": "One number per date range, or one row per breakdown value.",
  "dimensions": [
    "country",
    "device",
    "page",
    "keyword",
    "source_medium",
    "intent",
    "category"
  ],
  "requiredFilters": [
    "date_range"
  ],
  "sources": [
    "web-analytics"
  ],
  "reports": [
    "ai-referral-traffic-report",
    "content-performance-report",
    "monthly-executive-search-report",
    "search-to-revenue-report"
  ],
  "skills": [
    "search-to-revenue",
    "significance-referee",
    "monthly-exec-review"
  ],
  "verbs": [
    "web_analytics_overview",
    "conversions_overview",
    "pop_significance"
  ],
  "rungs": [
    "R5"
  ],
  "levers": [],
  "questions": [
    "What is our conversion rate?",
    "Did conversion rate really change versus last month?"
  ],
  "interpretation": "The efficiency half of the outcome story, measured entirely inside the analytics source. It is stored as a fraction and displayed as a percent, so a value of 0.021 is 2.1%. Because the denominator is an estimated distinct user count rather than sessions, it answers what share of PEOPLE converted, not what share of visits did, and because the numerator counts conversion EVENTS rather than converted users, the two sides are not a matched proportion and the ratio is not a per-person probability.",
  "caveats": [
    "Never derive this from a conversion count and a click count. Conversion rate comes from the analytics source; dividing one system's numerator by another system's denominator produces a number that is wrong in a way nobody can see.",
    "The numerator counts conversion EVENTS, not converted users, while the denominator is an estimated distinct user count. The two are not a matched proportion, which is why the significance tool tests the displayed rate's own movement instead of modelling it as successes over trials.",
    "There is no session-denominator construction anywhere in the product. Every tool reads the displayed measure, conversions over estimated users, or the analytics source's own averaged per-row rate on non-enterprise accounts, and the code explicitly refuses to reconstruct a rate over sessions or clicks.",
    "On accounts below the enterprise analytics tier the tool swaps to a differently constructed twin: an average of a per-row rate column rather than a ratio of two totals. That is a different definition, not just a different source, and it is not reconstructible from aggregate counts at all.",
    "Stored as a fraction between 0 and 1; a consumer that multiplies by a hundred twice will report a rate a hundred times too high.",
    "Whole-domain only today."
  ],
  "freshness": "loads nightly, a same-day question gets yesterday's number, labelled as yesterday's.",
  "failureModes": [
    "Computing conversions divided by clicks and presenting it as conversion rate.",
    "Assuming the rate is conversions over sessions because that is the industry default, the denominator is an estimated distinct user count.",
    "Averaging per-page conversion rates into a site rate."
  ],
  "notSameAs": [
    {
      "slug": "conversions-count",
      "why": "The rate is its own measure with its own denominator and is never derived from the count. The code says so explicitly, and the two answer different questions: how many, versus what share."
    },
    {
      "slug": "conversion-rate-change",
      "why": "One is a level for a period; the other is the difference between two periods, carried on a different scale."
    },
    {
      "slug": "paid-cost-per-conversion",
      "why": "Cost per conversion is a price from the ad platform's attribution; conversion rate is a rate measured in the analytics source against your own named goals. They come from different systems and are never combined.",
      "mirroredFrom": "paid-cost-per-conversion"
    },
    {
      "slug": "funnel-dropoff-rate",
      "why": "Conversion rate is a single measured rate over users for the whole period; a funnel drop-off is the relative decline between two chosen aggregate counts. The end-to-end product of the drop-offs will not equal the conversion-rate measure.",
      "mirroredFrom": "funnel-dropoff-rate"
    }
  ],
  "related": [
    "conversions-count",
    "users",
    "conversion-rate-change",
    "significance-p-value"
  ],
  "workflows": [],
  "lastVerified": "2026-08-04"
}