Problem one: the geography
The widely circulated conversion benchmark datasets are drawn from United States advertiser accounts. That is not a criticism of the datasets, which are generally clear about what they are. It is a criticism of what happens next, which is that the figures are reprinted on UK pages with the dollars swapped for pounds and the origin dropped.
Search behaviour, competitive density and the shape of the auction all differ. A conversion rate from a market where four national franchises bid on every roofing term tells a Hampshire roofer very little.
Problem two: what is being counted
This is the larger issue and it is rarely raised. Most published conversion rates count form submissions, because forms are what the reporting tools measure by default.
A trade business does not get its work through forms. It gets it through the phone, and increasingly through WhatsApp. A roofing company with a 1% form conversion rate and a phone ringing forty times a week is not converting at 1%. It is converting perfectly well and measuring almost none of it.
Compared against a benchmark built on form fills, that business looks like a failure on paper while being a success in the yard. We have seen accounts paused on exactly this misreading.
What good measurement looks like here
- Count calls as conversions, with call tracking so you know which ones came from which source and how long they lasted. A twelve-second call is not an enquiry.
- Count WhatsApp taps. Trivial to implement and routinely left out, which means the channel looks like it produces nothing.
- Judge on qualified enquiries, not conversions. The number that matters is jobs you would actually want, not events a tag fired on.
- Compare against yourself. Last quarter is a far better benchmark than an American average, because it holds everything else constant.
The arithmetic that actually decides whether a campaign works is your break-even cost per enquiry, which depends on your job value and close rate rather than on anyone's industry table. There is a calculator for it here that runs in your browser and asks for no email address.
Questions
Is there any UK conversion benchmark worth using?
None that we would put in front of a client as a target. Where UK figures exist they are generally a single agency's client base, which is a legitimate thing to publish and a poor thing to be measured against. Your own trailing quarter is more useful than any of them.
Why do so many agencies report on form fills then?
Because it is the number that appears in the reporting tool without anybody having to set anything up. Call tracking and WhatsApp events take deliberate work. A report built only on forms is usually a sign that the work was not done, rather than a sign that the campaign failed.
What conversion rate should we aim for?
Aim at a cost per qualified enquiry you can afford, and let the conversion rate be whatever it turns out to be. A 2% rate at an affordable cost beats a 6% rate on enquiries you cannot convert into work.