What is CVR?

Conversion rate is usually the cheapest of the three profitability levers to improve, because the traffic is already paid for. Moving CVR from 1.5% to 2% is a 33% improvement in cost per purchase without spending another rupee on media.

CVR here means the site-wide number, measured against all sessions from every source. That is the one to distinguish from landing page CVR, which is deliberately narrower: it counts only people who arrived from an ad, and it divides by landing page views rather than sessions. Site CVR tells you how well the store sells; landing page CVR tells you how well one paid campaign’s page sells. The second is almost always the lower of the two, and it is the one to look at before blaming the ads.

The trap is treating it as a single number. A site-wide CVR blends paid and organic, mobile and desktop, new and returning, and the average conceals exactly the segment that is broken. Split it before you act on it. In most accounts we look at, mobile paid traffic converts at roughly half the site average, and that gap is where the money is.

It is also worth being clear about which stage is failing. If people add to cart and never reach checkout, the problem is trust, shipping cost or payment options. If they reach checkout and abandon, it is usually the form, the delivery estimate or a surprise charge. Those are different fixes, and no amount of campaign restructuring in the ad account solves either of them.