What is the average web site conversion rate among B2B SaaS services for web site visitor to 30 days free trial CRM? (all traffic come from Google Adwords)

The more interesting question is what % conversion you have to Paid.  Free trial is just a small step on the path to revenue, and possibly may give you conflicting inputs. For example, at EchoSign, by driving traffic to our Try It page (lowest possible bar), the 'conversion' rate historically was extremely high - 20%+.  The so-called "Best in Class" from those VCs.  But it had no bearing on conversion to paid.  It was so easy, it often meant nothing. By driving traffic to a full Product Trial, the conversion rate to registrant was an order of magnitude lower ... but the ultimate conversion to paid (not free, but paid) was higher.  It required a higher level of engagement, with more friction, but also provided a richer experience.  This led to more revenue. I'll tell you this is more counterintuitive than you might think.  But I'd suggest that at some point, unless you are all freemium and VSB ... it will help to put a little (just a tiny but, just a little) friction into the process.  Because it will prequalify your leads. In the early days, of course, you may not have enough data to do this complete analysis, but you can probably start 90+ days in from any material volume of free trials.  Sounds like you are there or getting close.

This question is actually one of my pet peeves. In my experience, benchmarks in this kind of scenario only ever have negative implications. There are two main reasons for this: You don't want to be average, and that's what measuring against average results in. Every free trial has a different value, even in the same sector. Let me explain:1) You don't want to be average, and that's what measuring against average results in.Imagine we surveyed 500 CRM startups, and measured their conversion rate to free trial for their Google Adwords Campaigns. The average (mean) of those conversion rates, came out at 3% (random example, but for Adwords it's not uncommon to see it somewhere 3-6%).When you review the individual pieces of data, and plot them on a graph, you'll almost certainly see the 80/20 distribution begin to emerge. It's everywhere. Here's what that looks like in this instance: Do you see the problem? Sure, 250 of your competitors have a 3% or lower conversion rate. But look at #1 out there. They're converting well above 25%. If you're using the "average" to determine whether you're "doing alright" or not, then you're never going to be able to compete (at least not on this dimension). Why? Because you'll get to 3%, and think "Ah great, we're doing 'okay'". Perhaps you might push it to 4-5%... "Yes, we're now 50% better than average, we must be doing great!"Nope, the leaders are still kicking the shit out of you. So forget about the average.2) Every free trial has a different value, even in the same sector.So what if Salesforce convert, say, I don't know, 15% of visits into Free Trials. It means nothing to you, even if you're selling a CRM. Your product should be differentiated. It has a different target buyer. A different price model. Different challenges, lifetime values, sales cycles.. So what another CRM company achieves is completely irrelevant to you. Even in the same segment. At least unless you're just a clone, in which case what the hell are you doing anyway? You'll be playing catch-up forever and out of business before you know it.Let's give an example, say your free trial is converting at 30%. You then convert 2% of those into paid customers, and your ACV is $10k.You somehow find out your competitors only convert to free trial at 5% (woah, look how great we're doing!), but what you don't know is that they then close 20% of those into $100k ACV deals. Which company do you want to be the CEO of? So again: look at how irrelevant "average" is in this context. One is massively below average on their free trial conversion, and the other massively above. But there's only one clear winner. When you combine these two factors, the average you sought has become completely and utterly meaningless, and worse still, a complacency building distraction that will only detract from your company's performance. --------------What to Measure Against InsteadIt's actually super simple. Measure: This week's free trial conversion rate against last weeks. This month's free trial conversion rate against last months. This quarters... you see where I'm going. All that matters is that you're continually improving. Forget about everyone else. Most free trials convert like crap. Most SaaS Startups have massive flaws in their process. They succeed in spite of these, but you can do better.If you continually think about benchmarks, you'll be the dark green company in the chart below. No one wants to be that company. And please, please don't measure this metric in isolation. Any company can make a free trial that converts at 20%. Really. Hire a great copywriter and designer, and lie to them about what your product does. Make every promise you can imagine to your visitor. Say everything that they want to hear.They'll fill in that form.But what will they do? Sign-up. Be disappointed. Fail to convert into a customer.... And swear never to do business with your company again. Worse still, they might just end up here on Quora, featuring your Startup in a "What's the worst free trial experience you ever had?" question.So when you run that next landing page A/B test and double your free trial conversion rate, measure the ACV generated from that new cohort, too. Better still, for insight you can act on faster, measure the Leading Indicators of ACV: trial engagement, Ideal Persona fit, level of contact with sales, etc.Same or better? Great. But if it's halved... Well, you've made things worse for yourself. Sure, you're getting more trial users, but all you did is convert the ones that weren't ever going to pay for your solution anyway. And what are those free trial users? A distraction from what really matters. Just Another Vanity Metric.

I think that 2-3% is very low. As an example, the average conversion rate from traffic to sign-up / trial we achieve for our SaaS vendors clients at http://GetApp.com is 7%. Our traffic is already pre-qualified but knowing that most of the traffic to a vendor´s site will come from paid search, organic traffic and industry referrals, I would think that the quality is quiet high and they should get a minimum of 5%. Assuming they have a free trial or a freemium model of course.

Depends significantly on the product and the friction. For a low friction product I aim for 10%. If you miss and hit 7% no one will complain! If we're talking Unique Visitors and not Total Visits, you should definitely be able to hit 10%+ with real testing of your landing page and listening to what users say they do and don't understand from your positioning. As mentions, conversions to Paid is an entirely different ballgame. http://playbook.thoughtbot.com/defining-actionable-metrics/aarrr/. Take it one step at a time!

I work with several B to B SaaS companies, and if we're just looking at AdWords traffic, then I'd look at: Keyword relevance - if you're just buying the most targeted keywords, then you can expect a higher conversion rate than if you want to grow faster and are willing to spend more money for less targeted traffic Your site's normal conversion rate - I would look for adwords traffic to convert about 50% better than the random traffic coming to your site because the traffic coming to the site is much more qualified due to the fact that they're searching for a solution to the problem they have. To put hard numbers against it, I think 5-10% of the traffic signing up is a realistic range, but that's a massive generalization and assumes that you have a company that is up and running with a known sales process.

I'm happy to share our direct experience on this. I've got three months of data for our social recruiting app and I can tell you that we're seeing just over a 2% conversion of visitors to free trial sign ups. The data set is probably not ideal as early stage visits will come from friends, family, tyre kickers and competitors :) If I can get to 3% in the next 8 weeks I'll be happy. 7% as Christophe suggests he's seeing would be great. John

I'd like to add to the discussion that the way Adwords ads will convert really depends on your product and the type of customers you target. If you're selling a high end product for M or L companies, your conversion rate wouldn't be too crash hot. Big companies rarely look for solutions to their business needs in search engine ads. For example, big companies either put out a RFP or look at a Gartner report for potential vendors. Other factors to consider are of course your page's call to action, how exhausting your sign up form is (how many fields, etc.), whether an upfront credit card number is required, etc. Either way, 5% is more likely than 50% :).

(Exact numbers freshly pulled from our analytics app) We have 4.24%. However, we have about 7.28% clicking through to the sign up page, but only 58.18% signing up. We could get this close to 100% with popup signups, testimonials or other forms of validation on the sign up page. Need to implement them and run A/B tests. I think 10% is a reasonable goal.

We at http://www.cake.hr are seeing visitor-to-trial signup rate at around 4-5%. In the same time doing loads of A/B tests on pages to improve this significantly.