Conversion Rate Benchmarks 2026: Industry and Channel Data

What “Conversion Rate” Means in Each Dataset

Every conversion rate is a count of conversions divided by something, and published benchmarks divide by different things. Ecommerce analytics datasets divide purchases by sessions or visitors. Landing page benchmarks divide conversions by the visitors to one page. Ad platforms divide conversions by ad clicks or interactions, and SaaS surveys divide paying customers by signups. A 1.4% store rate and an 8.18% search-ad rate can both be healthy, because they measure different steps of the journey.

Before comparing your own figure with any row on this page, check which denominator your analytics tool uses. Google Analytics 4 reports both a session key event rate and a user key event rate, and the same site produces a different number for each. For setting up those reports, see our guide to GA4 analytics dashboards.

What a “Good” Conversion Rate Looks Like in 2026

For online stores, the most transparent current benchmark is Littledata’s: across 433 Shopify stores measured between July 20 and October 17, 2026, the median store converted 1.4% of sessions into orders. A store above 2.7% was in the top 20%, and one above 3.6% in the top 10%. The mean was 1.9%, pulled up by a minority of stores that convert far above the rest.

Other ecommerce datasets land in the same range once you note what they divide by. IRP Commerce measured 1.97% for UK and Irish merchants in September 2026, Dynamic Yield 2.68% of visitors over the 12 months to September 2026, and Contentsquare, which also counts form submissions, 2.3% of visits across all industries in the fourth quarter of 2025. Landing pages and ad clicks sit much higher, at 6.6% (Unbounce) and 8.18% (WordStream/LocaliQ), because they measure one step taken by people who have already shown interest.

Ecommerce Conversion Rates by Industry

Industry rankings agree more than the levels do. Beauty and food rank near the top in both Dynamic Yield’s data (beauty and personal care 5.38%, the highest of eight industries, and food and beverage 4.56%, behind pet care at 4.84%) and Littledata’s (beauty and skincare 2.9%, food and beverage and health and supplements 2.4%). Home and furniture sits near the bottom in both, at 1.22% and 1.0%, and luxury and jewelry is lowest in Dynamic Yield’s data at 0.69%.

The levels differ, often by close to a factor of two for the same industry (food and beverage 4.56% against 2.4%), because Dynamic Yield divides purchases by visitors and reports an average, while Littledata divides sessions with a purchase by all sessions and reports the median store. IRP Commerce’s UK and Irish category rates swing widely: arts and crafts converted 5.76% of sessions in September 2026 (4.32% a year earlier) and baby and child 0.44% (0.69%). Treat a single month as a snapshot, not a benchmark.

Lead Generation Conversion Rates by Industry

For lead-generation businesses, a widely cited benchmark is WordStream/LocaliQ’s annual study of US search campaigns in 23 industries, which measures tracked conversions per ad click and pairs them with cost per lead. In the 2026 edition, animals and pets converted 16.22% of clicks and finance and insurance 2.64%, against an all-industry median of 8.18%.

Facebook leads campaigns in the same publisher’s 2026 report converted 8.54% of clicks overall, from 15.87% in education to 4.15% for automotive sales. These are medians of US campaigns, so half the campaigns in each industry did better. For cost per click and cost per lead alongside these rates, see our Google Ads benchmarks and Facebook ads benchmarks.

Conversion Rates by Marketing Channel

Channel benchmarks are where definitions diverge most. Across Contentsquare’s 6,500+ websites, paid search was the best-converting paid channel at 2.8% of visits and organic social one of the weakest at 0.7%. On Unbounce landing pages, email visitors converted at 19.3% on average and paid search visitors at 10.9%; these rates are per landing page visitor, so they run far higher. Omnisend’s 9% is a different measure again: the share of email clicks followed by a purchase.

Platform figures are per ad click. Ecommerce brands using Triple Whale saw a median 3.11% of Google Ads clicks and 1.53% of Meta Ads clicks become purchases. In Metadata’s B2B data, spend-weighted, 5.9% of clicks on LinkedIn lead-generation campaigns became leads and 1.9% on Google Ads. That is a different measure from WordStream/LocaliQ’s 8.18%, a median of every conversion action tracked across US search campaigns, so the two should not be compared. More on the B2B platforms in our LinkedIn Ads benchmarks, and on channel planning in our paid media work.

Traffic From AI Assistants

Visits referred by ChatGPT, Perplexity and other AI assistants are still a small share of traffic: 0.2% across Contentsquare’s websites in the fourth quarter of 2025, though up 632% in a year. How well they convert depends on whose data you read. Contentsquare found AI-referred visits converting at 1.3%, up 55% but still just above organic social. Adobe, measuring US retail sites only, found AI-referred visitors converting 48% better than other traffic in August 2026, and Salesforce reported AI-search referrals converting nine times more often than social referrals over the 2025 holidays.

The datasets cover different sites and compare against different baselines (all other channels, all non-AI traffic, or social only), so none of them is a single “AI conversion rate”. Track AI referrals as their own channel in your analytics; our guide to AI customer journey mapping covers how to attribute them.

Mobile vs Desktop Conversion Gap

Most traffic is mobile, but whether mobile converts worse depends on the dataset. Contentsquare found desktop visits converting at 3.4% against 2.0% on mobile across all industries, with mobile 69.9% of traffic. Littledata’s Shopify medians are almost level, at 1.6% on mobile and 1.5% on desktop, and Dynamic Yield’s customers saw mobile ahead at 2.86% against 2.23%.

Contentsquare suggests conversions are often multi-device journeys, with users arriving on mobile and returning on desktop to act, which lifts desktop’s rate per visit. Unbounce’s landing pages, 83% visited on mobile, converted 8% better on desktop. On the sales side, mobile accounted for 61.4% of IRP Commerce merchants’ sales in September 2026 and 56.4% of US online holiday transactions in 2025 (Adobe).

Landing Page Conversion Benchmarks

Unbounce’s 2024 report is the latest edition of its landing page benchmark: a 6.6% median conversion rate across 41,000+ pages, ranging from 3.8% for SaaS to 12.3% for entertainment. It counts conversions per unique visitor to the page, not purchases, and Unbounce has not published a 2025 or 2026 edition. Its previous edition put the median at 3.2% (October 2018 to October 2019), so the two editions should not be read as a trend without allowing for changes in the pages sampled.

For page speed, copy, form and testing data on landing pages, see our landing page statistics.

B2B and SaaS Conversion Rates

B2B conversion is a chain of rates rather than one number. ChartMogul’s January 2026 survey of 200 B2B software products put the median free-to-paid conversion rate at 8%, measured as leads or signups that became paying customers within six months. Trials that require a credit card converted 30%, but fewer visitors start them: per 1,000 visitors, card-required trials produced 35 signups and 10.5 customers, against 45 signups and 3.6 customers for trials without a card.

First Page Sage’s client data gives higher trial rates, 18.2% without a card and 48.8% with one, but counts a conversion at the first paid month. Its figures for B2B websites (1.1% of visitors converting for B2B SaaS, 7.4% for legal services) come from one agency’s clients. Later in the funnel, B2B advertisers using Metadata won 22.3% of closed ad-sourced opportunities in 2025. For what these rates mean for acquisition cost, see our customer acquisition cost benchmarks.

Funnel Stage Conversion Data

Stage rates show where a store loses buyers. In Littledata’s Shopify data, the median store saw a product added to the cart in 6.8% of sessions, and 51% of sessions that started checkout went on to purchase. Of sessions with an add to cart, 78% ended without an order; Dynamic Yield’s average, which divides purchases by carts created, is similar at 77.38%, with mobile (79.53%) well above desktop (69.56%).

Baymard Institute’s widely quoted 70.22% is different in kind: an average of 50 published abandonment studies, some more than a decade old, rather than a measurement. Returning visitors also convert better than new ones, 2.9% against 1.7% across Contentsquare’s websites, and made up 52.8% of traffic.

Checkout Friction and Form Length

Baymard’s checkout benchmark found the average ecommerce checkout had 11.3 form fields across 5.1 steps in 2024, while most sites need only 8. In its survey of US shoppers, 42% had abandoned a cart while just browsing; among the rest, extra costs were the most cited reason (40%), and 18% cited being asked to create an account and 17% a long or complicated checkout. Baymard estimates large sites could gain a 35.26% conversion increase from fixing checkout usability issues, which is a modelled estimate, not a measured average.

Platform claims about checkout conversion are vendor claims: Shopify says its checkout converts 15% better than competitors on average, from a 2023 study with an unnamed consulting firm. For checkout and storefront work, see our ecommerce services.

Testing and Optimisation: What the Data Shows

Experiment data is a useful corrective to claims of fast, large lifts. Across 173,000 experiments run on Optimizely, only 12% produced a statistically significant improvement on the primary metric, and the median customer company ran 34 experiments a year. Optimizely puts the average revenue lift of an applied revenue-focused experiment at 0.4%. Gains come from running many tests and keeping the winners, not from any single change.

Measure the result in revenue and pipeline, not only in conversion rate; our guide to tracking AI-era marketing KPIs covers the reporting side.

What Changed Between 2025 and 2026

The datasets with year-on-year comparisons do not agree on direction. Contentsquare found conversion rates down 5.1% between the fourth quarters of 2024 and 2025, offset by average order values up 6%. IRP Commerce’s UK and Irish merchants converted a higher share of sessions in September 2026 (1.97%) than a year earlier (1.68%), on 15.27% fewer visitors. Search-ad conversion rates rose in 87% of industries in WordStream/LocaliQ’s 2026 edition, while Triple Whale’s ecommerce brands converted fewer Google Ads and Meta Ads clicks.

Seasonality matters as much as the year: Dynamic Yield’s monthly rate ran from 3.38% in November 2025 to 2.33% in April 2026. Online sales are a larger share of retail than a year earlier. US e-commerce grew 12.2% against 6.7% for all retail sales and reached 17.1% of the total in the second quarter of 2026 (Census Bureau, seasonally adjusted); in Great Britain the online share was 27.3% in August 2026 against 26.1% a year earlier (ONS, not seasonally adjusted). The two countries define retail differently, so the shares are not directly comparable.

Widely Quoted Figures, Checked

Several conversion rate statistics circulate without a source, or with a source that measured something else. Each one below is checked against the publisher’s own page.

Sources

Every figure on this page comes from one of the sources below.