Conversion Rate: Are You Calculating it Correctly?

Conversion rate is arguably one of the most important metrics you can track on Amazon.

Typically when discussing conversion rates(CVR) in advertising, we are measuring how likely someone is to place an order after clicking on your ad. What gets tricky is when looking at your overall CVR in Amazon’s business reports.

Amazon business reports list two conversion rates – Unit Sessions Percentage and Order Session Percentage.

• • Unit Session Percentage: measures how likely customers are to buy a single unit after they visit your listing. 

• • Order Item Session Percentage: measures how likely customers are to place an order after they visit your listing.

Where discrepancies emerge is when you have products where people buy multiple units per order. With how critical conversion rates are, if you’re not looking at the big picture, you might be making some big mistakes with how you react.

Here’s what you can do:

Instead of using Unit Session Percentage, make sure you are using Order Item Session Percentage in Seller Central’s business reports which is the order CVR. The key takeaway here is to make sure to keep everything consistent, so you’re basing decisions on apples to apples comparisons.  

(Note: There are some benefits to tracking CVR on a per unit basis versus per order.  If you track based on units, the key message is just to be consistent throughout and keep this in mind when comparing conversion rates.)