5 charts that can help you better grasp conversion rate in 2025

Trying to convert shoppers in 2024 often felt like the “sell me this pen” scene in The Wolf of Wall Street.

…only the pen doesn’t work.

Jokes aside, if you share the sentiment that conversion rates were slightly worse this year than the last, you might be on to something.

So we went through recent data to help us better understand conversion rate metrics—as well as adjust our expectations going into the new year. 

SaaS and e-commerce landing pages conversion rates are below average

A good landing page is built to convert.

Yet, not all industries’ landing pages convert as smoothly. Let’s have a look:

To unpack this, we’ll have to ask: 

What do events, entertainment, and often education have in common? 

Their offers are often time-sensitive—liketickets, or empty bootcamp slots. So it’s not strange that high-intent users engage with these landing pages and convert.

Industries like financial or legal are also often high-intent, albeit with less urgency. Yet, they are still close to the average rate. 

On the other hand, SaaS and e-commerce are the lowest performing categories, performing way below the median value. 

Makes sense. These two industries—especially SaaS—often require detailed product evaluations before converting.

What does it mean: Urgency often sells. Even if you’re not in the time sensitive industry, try adding elements of urgency to your landing page to motivate users to convert earlier.

Conversion rates slightly fell this year in most markets

It’s not been the best year for conversions, but it might not be as bad as it first seems.

Here’s the official conversion rate data for the first two quarters this year in different markets:

First, the obvious: Q4 boosts conversion rates in most countries. 

But a new trend emerged this year—there was a big downtrend in conversion rates—and possibly sales—during Q1 compared to last year at the same time.

This could mean that customers had a much bigger post-holiday shopping regret compared to last year. With the economy on shaky legs at the start of the year… It makes sense.

This downward slope continued in Q2, with conversion rates being slightly lower on a global scale in 2024 compared to 2023. 

For the US market, the disparity was higher than the median. 

We can predict two things : Q4 2024 might bring similar or slightly less conversions than Q4 2023—and as we enter the new year, you can expect a few slower months. 

At least that’s what we can learn from this report.

Makeup industry sees the highest conversion rate in e-commerce

According to one report, the beauty industry is probably the highest-converting out of all in ecommerce. 

Let’s check:

The average e-commerce conversion rate appears to be 1.9%.

Of course, if you’re selling luxury goods, you can always expect it to be on the lower side (0.4% to 0.7%) and the same applies for home furniture. 

However, other products we can consider “essentials” such as food, beverage, clothing, skincare are all above 2.2%—which is above average.

What can you do: Touch base first. If your conversion rate matches the above, maybe you’re actually performing as expected. And maybe you can convince your clients you do, too.

And if you’re falling behind, this could make you rethink your strategy. 

Cyber Monday is the highest-converting Q4 Holiday

A few months ago we wrote about under-the-radar BFCM trends and we’ve noticed that Cyber Monday is bigger than Black Friday. 

The conversion rate data confirms this:

We see two things here:

• Cyber Monday is the highest converting sales day, higher than Black Friday.
• Desktop is still king: With almost double the mobile conversion rate.

Also, we see that conversion rate is slightly lower during the Thanksgiving eve.

Which could mean shoppers are browsing on both devices, but still not feeling as pressured to buy—using Thanksgiving as a casual, research day without much commitment. 

So during Q4 you can bank on Cyber Monday and Black Friday days for most sales. While during Thanksgiving—shoppers might scroll more casually, so distributing some content at this time to stay top of mind could work wonders short-term.

Email is undisputedly the highest converting channel

That’s not strange. 

But it’s still interesting to know just how effective email marketing can be. 

Check it out:

What’s interesting is that email has double the conversion rate of paid search. But also that paid social is performing a bit better than search—especially on platforms like Instagram.

However, email is still the undisputed king of conversions. 

It’s high-intent, it is usually mid-funnel and bottom-funnel channel, and first-party data is also the “safest bet” when it comes to targeting. So don’t neglect it.

The conversion verdict

What we learned? Desktop still leads mobile in Q4 shopping, Cyber Monday is the MVP, and urgency drives action—or conversions.

And about urgency… adding time-sensitive elements to your strategy and focusing on high-intent channels like email might help you get better results. So double down on those.