Term: Conversion Rate
The best way to explain what a conversion rate in marketing is, is first to tell you what is return on investment.
Return on investment or ROI is just that, return you receive on an investment that you made. ROI is the ratio of money gained or lost on an investment relative to the amount of money invested. Lets make an example in Adwords. If you invested 1000$ in attracting 1000 potential customers to your site, then you need to sell 1001$ worth of goods to make a profit. Right? Well that 1001$ is your ROI (return on investment).
So the best thing to do is to make sure you make those sales so you have a profitable ROI. You will do this by converting visitors into buyers. Percentage of this converting is called conversion rate. Lets say 10 people buy, out of 100 people that visit, this means you have a conversion rate of 10% which is very good! So, conversion rate is a percentage of visitors you manage to convert into buyers! Some of the top selling sites on the internet claim to have a conversion rate of 20%!