Software ConversionYou have launched your software and started selling it online. You are actively promoting and are getting visitors and leads from different traffic generating efforts such as SEO, PPC, Banners, Shareware sites, Word-of-mouth, Resellers and other activities.

But the visitors aren’t really converting into buyers, at least not in any satisfactory numbers. Maybe 95% are leaving your website without taking any action…

So how do you know you are doing a good job?

Read on and find out how you can benchmark your conversion rates…

Benchmark Software Sales Digital River is the world’s largest provider of e-commerce solutions for software publishers, currently managing half of the digital downloads for the software market (according to themselves.)

A daughter company, Fireclick provides a service that you should check out, a software conversion benchmark index.

According to Fireclick you should have a conversion rate about 3.5 to four percent today, and as this is based on such a large part of the market the numbers give good guidelines of what kind of conversion rate you should have.

I would be hesitant to share my numbers with Fireclick, but the overview is free and you can check conversion rates for a full year back in time.

We have noticed that many different factors play a part in the conversion numbers. For example when you are launching a new major version of your software and are targeting previous clients you should aim for numbers in the range of 10% – 40%.

Among other factors you should take into consideration are:

  • Competition
  • Price levels
  • Niche
  • How well-known brand you have (company and product)
  • Yearly fluctuations
  • Traffic sources
  • Sales cycle
  • Product-/Upgrade launch

I will go into more depths on some of these factors in future blog posts.

If you are interested in improving your online software sales, take a look at my previous blog post on how to sell more software online.

We also provide a service on how to improve conversion on software publishers websites and we are currently looking for reference clients. You can contact me if you would like to know more about this service.

Until next time 😉

Peter Gillberg – Software Marketing Secrets