Stop staring at conversion rate: watch revenue per visitor

Conversion rate is the number everyone quotes. Out of every hundred visitors, how many bought? It’s useful, but on its own it can point you the wrong way.

Here’s the problem. A channel that sends lots of people who buy something cheap can have a great conversion rate and still be worth less than a channel that sends fewer people who buy something bigger. Conversion rate counts buyers. It doesn’t count money.

Revenue per visitor counts both.

What revenue per visitor is

It’s your revenue divided by your visitors, over the same period.

It’s the same thing as conversion rate multiplied by your average order. So it moves when either one moves: more people buying, or people buying more.

A quick example

Imagine two channels over a month (example numbers):

• Instagram: 2,000 visitors, 60 buyers, $20 average order. Conversion 3%. Revenue $1,200.
• YouTube: 800 visitors, 12 buyers, $85 average order. Conversion 1.5%. Revenue $1,020.

Instagram wins on conversion rate and on total revenue. But per visitor, Instagram is worth $0.60 and YouTube $1.28, more than twice as much.

So if you have one more evening this week to make content, the YouTube visitor is the better bet. Each one you earn is worth more than twice as much.

Work it out yourself

1. Pick a period long enough for each channel to have a few buyers. A month is a good start.
2. For each channel, write down its visitors and the revenue from visitors who came that way.
3. Divide revenue by visitors.
4. Sort from highest to lowest.

The hard part is step 2. Your store can tell you total revenue, and most analytics can tell you visitors by channel, but joining the two means knowing which visit each sale came from. More on that below.

Read it honestly

Revenue per visitor is a ratio, and ratios built on small numbers mislead. A few habits keep it honest.

Wait for enough buyers. One $200 order from a channel with 40 visitors makes it look worth $5 a visitor. It isn’t, yet. odo’s weekly summary only names a channel once it has at least 50 visitors and 3 paying customers that week, and even that is a floor, not a guarantee.

Take refunds out. A channel that sells a lot and refunds a lot is worth less than it looks. Count revenue after refunds where you can.

Decide how to credit return visits. Plenty of people find you on one channel and buy days later after coming back another way. Crediting their first visit rewards whatever introduced them. Crediting the last one rewards whatever closed the sale. Look at both before you move your effort.

Compare like with like. A launch week and a quiet week aren’t the same. Compare channels across the same period, and the same period across months.

What to do with it

Once you trust the number, it answers practical questions.

Where to spend your time. Make more of whatever brings the most valuable visitors, not just the most visitors.

What you can pay for a click. If a visitor from search is worth $0.90 and you keep about half of each sale after your costs, a visitor is worth about $0.45 to you. Pay more than that per click and ads lose money. Pay less and they make it.

Which pages earn their traffic. Revenue per visitor works for landing pages too. A page with lots of visitors and a low figure is a page worth fixing first.

Whether growth is real. Watch the number over time, not just once. If visitors double and revenue per visitor halves, you reached a lot of new people who weren’t very interested, which can happen when a post travels outside your usual audience. That’s still useful to know, but it’s not the same as twice the business.

How odo shows it

odo traces each sale back to the visit that brought it, so revenue per visitor comes straight from your data instead of a spreadsheet.

The Sales from visits card shows your sales, your customers, revenue per visitor, and how long people usually take to buy. Tap a channel, a source or a campaign and the whole dashboard narrows to it, per-visitor figure included. The Sources and Pages cards list visitors and sales side by side for every row.

A switch on the same card moves between last touch and first touch, so you can see which channels close sales and which ones start them. Refunds take their credit back from the visit their sale was traced to, so a channel’s number is after refunds. Sales from visits are counted before fees.

Every Monday, the weekly summary in Slack, Discord, Telegram or email names where a visitor was worth the most that week. And odo’s next moves tell you when a channel is worth doubling down on, with the numbers behind the suggestion.

Tracing works with Stripe, Lemon Squeezy, Polar, Paddle, Gumroad, Dodo Payments, Shopify and WooCommerce, and with purchases your own site reports to odo. To split a channel down to single posts, tag your links: UTM links, explained. And for what “after refunds” really means for your numbers, see refunds, fees and disputes.