How do you determine how well you’re doing at something? By comparing. Whether it’s taking a look at historical performance, projections, or the competition, measuring one set of numbers against another is the most efficient way to find out if you’re pulling out in front, or need to revise your plan.

When it comes to conversion rates for landing pages, there’s a lot of information and available data with which to make comparisons, but it’s nowhere near apples to apples if you run a marketing company and the conversion rate data you have is from a travel company.

2017 Conversion Rates Broken Down by Industry

Unbounce , which helps you build custom landing pages and overlays to increase conversions, released a conversion benchmark report across multiple industries . Hallelujah!

They calculated median and best conversion rates by analyzing the behavior of over 74 million visitors to 64,000+ lead generation landing pages over the last quarter. They categorized pages into ten industries:

• Travel
• Real Estate
• Business Consulting
• Business Services
• Credit & Lending
• Health
• Higher Education
• Home Improvement
• Legal
• Vocational Studies & Job Training

While all the information surfaced in the report is interesting, like the fact travel, credit & lending, business consulting and vocational studies & job training are best at lead gen with conversion rates over 12%, we’ll focus on what’s most relevant to the Adstage audience: business services.

How Business Services Marketers Stack Up

Drumroll, please! First, we’ll start at the low end of what Unbounce’s investigating turned up. According to their data, 36.6% of marketers in Business Services have at least one page that converts at less than 1.4%, putting them in the 25th percentile.

On the superstar end of the spectrum, if your landing page has a conversion rate above 13%, you’re performing better than 90% of your competitors.

Don’t fret if you’re falling below the mark, later in this post we’ll cover recommendations for increasing conversion rates.

The Importance of Vertical-Specific Comparison

The beauty of Unbounce’s report is that it gives an in-depth look into numbers per vertical. This is hugely important in getting data that’s actually useful and relevant to your own business.

To understand how drastically numbers can vary between verticals, take a look at the graphs below, which show the results for landing pages for business services and business consulting.

While both in the B2B space, a top landing page conversion rate for consulting is over 21%. It would be unfair (and maybe impossible) for a business services marketer to try to hit that rate when the reality is that most companies in that industry should set their sights at almost half that, at 13%.

Recommendations To Increase Landing Page Conversions

If your numbers are lower than you’d like, or you want to push your pages into the 90th percentile, Unbounce has some tips on adjusting copy:

• Be concise . Their study found pages with fewer than 100 words convert 50% better than pages with 500+ words.
• Establish trust . Unbounce suggests if more than 8% of your language implies trust, you could see some improvement in your conversion rates.

Also check out our post on boosting PPC landing page conversions for more ideas to test out on your pages.

Download the full report to see data for other industries, highlighted differences between verticals, and the methodology used to collect data.