The Average Conversion Rate for Paid Search

Clients often ask their Sherpa what is a good conversion rate for their paid search campaign. Without having to fall back on a lot of "it depends"—on your industry, landing page layout, campaign configuration, creative or copy—here are some pointers from a recent analysis of thousands of Google Ads campaigns totalling $3 billion in spend:

As you can see from the graph, the median performance was 2.35%, but looking at the distribution reveals some interesting points:

• about 1/4 of all accounts have less than 1% conversion rates
• the top 25% of accounts have twice that—5.31% or greater
• the top 10% of Google Ads advertisers have account conversion rates of 11.45%

A closer look at the conversion rates by industry found that the top tenth consistently performed 3-5x the median conversion rate for their particular industry. Ecommerce may have the lowest median conversion rates at 1.84% and Finance the highest at 5.01%, but the top tenth still stood out as remarkable performers across all industries.

How does your paid search campaign conversion rate compare in performance?