Someone always asks what a good conversion rate is, and the honest answer disappoints: it depends so heavily on traffic source, offer, industry and how you define a conversion that published benchmarks are close to useless for decision-making.
Why benchmarks mislead
A site counting newsletter signups will report a far higher rate than one counting demo requests, and the second business may be considerably healthier. Branded traffic converts several times better than cold display traffic on the same site. An average across thousands of sites conceals all of it.
What to measure instead
Your own rate, segmented and tracked over time. Split by channel, because organic, paid, direct and social behave differently. Split by device, since mobile is usually lower and that gap is the opportunity. Split by landing page, which is where the actionable differences live. Then watch the trend rather than the absolute number.
Rough orientation, with caveats
For UK service businesses, a well-built landing page taking relevant paid traffic commonly lands somewhere between two and five percent for enquiry forms. E-commerce sits lower on sitewide sessions, typically one to three percent. Treat those as orientation, not targets, and never as evidence that your number is fine.
The question that actually matters
Not “is 2.4% good” but “why did the other 97.6% leave, and which reason is cheapest to fix”. That question is answered with session recordings, form analytics and the pages where the funnel visibly leaks, not with a benchmark table.
Why this is worth the effort
Moving from two percent to three is a fifty percent increase in leads at zero additional media cost, and it applies to every channel simultaneously and permanently. On most sites that have never done conversion work deliberately, gains of that size are ordinary rather than exceptional.