Benchmarking Online Conversion Rates - what baselines should you use?

The baselines you should use have to be internally driven. They are the only numbers which you can rely on if you are to base business decisions on the figures. 

The numbers we have published here are valid guidelines to form objectives perhaps, but they should be taken with the proverbial pinch of salt as there have not been any indications from any of the publishers as to what parameters were used to get those figures. Also the reasons Ashley suggests are all valid variables which differ widely across websites, even from competitor to competitor. So the only reasonable numbers you can use are the ones you begin with internally.

If you start with a 2% global conversion rate, your ideal situation is to improve on that figure, regardless of whether your competitor says they have a 5% conversion rate or not. 

You might even want to get more targeted and segment your audience. Many websites have different kinds of visitors. We defined people as suspects, prospects and customers for one client and measured conversion across those individual segments. The conversion rates were as you'd expect wildly different. However because we'd benchmarked in house what those conversion rates were we could begin to improve upon them.

This is where measuring things like micro conversions becomes important, as improvements in micro conversions (steps in a particular process) might improve the conversion rate of prospect to customer or suspect to prospect.