HubSpot calculates conversion rate by dividing the number of conversions by the number of visitors, then multiplying by 100 to get a percentage. If your landing page received 5,000 visitors and 250 people filled out the form, your conversion rate is (250 / 5,000) × 100 = 5%. This same formula applies across every conversion opportunity HubSpot tracks, from CTAs to blog opt-ins to landing pages.
The Core Formula
Every conversion rate in HubSpot follows one pattern:
Conversion Rate = (Number of Conversions / Number of Visitors) × 100
What counts as a “conversion” depends on what you’re measuring. For a landing page, it’s a form submission. For a CTA button, it’s a click. For an email campaign, it might be a reply or a link click. The denominator is always the number of people who had the opportunity to convert, not your total site traffic. So if a form only appears on three blog posts, HubSpot divides form submissions by visitors to those three posts, not by every visitor to your entire website.
This distinction matters. Measuring a newsletter signup form against all website traffic would dramatically undercount your actual conversion rate, since most visitors never even saw the form. HubSpot scopes the calculation to visitors on pages where the conversion opportunity exists.
Where HubSpot Shows Conversion Rates
You don’t always need to calculate conversion rates manually. HubSpot surfaces them in several places depending on what you’re tracking.
Landing pages: In the landing page dashboard, HubSpot displays the submission rate for each page. This is the number of form submissions divided by page views.
Forms: The forms tool shows each form’s conversion rate based on how many people viewed the form versus how many submitted it. If you have the same form embedded on multiple pages, HubSpot can break down performance by page.
CTAs: For call-to-action buttons, HubSpot tracks the click rate (views of the CTA versus clicks) separately from the downstream conversion (clicks versus form completions on the destination page).
Campaigns: The campaigns tool aggregates conversion data across all assets tied to a campaign, including emails, landing pages, blog posts, and ads. It also tracks contacts through lifecycle stages so you can see how many people moved from lead to customer.
Building a Custom Conversion Rate Report
When the built-in dashboards don’t show exactly what you need, the custom report builder lets you construct your own conversion rate calculations. Here’s how to set one up for forms:
- Go to Reporting, then Reports, and click Create in the upper right.
- Select Custom Report, then click Next and choose Create Report on Your Own.
- Set your primary data source to Form Analytics. If you want to include form names or other properties, toggle on additional data sources and add Forms as a secondary source.
- Click Next, then drag the fields you need into the report configuration. For a basic conversion rate over time chart, set the X-axis to Occurred Date and the Y-axis to Form Conversion Rate.
- Choose a chart type like vertical bar to visualize how your form conversion rates trend week over week or month over month.
This approach is especially useful when you want to compare conversion rates across multiple forms, filter by date range, or break down performance by traffic source. The custom report builder gives you access to the underlying metrics so you can slice the data however you need.
Tracking Funnel Conversion Rates
Beyond page-level conversion rates, HubSpot lets you measure how contacts move through your sales funnel using lifecycle stages. The default stages run from Subscriber through Lead, Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL), Sales Qualified Lead (SQL), Opportunity, and Customer, though you can add custom stages.
To calculate the conversion rate between any two stages, divide the number of contacts who reached the later stage by the number who were in the earlier stage. If 200 leads became 40 MQLs in a given month, your lead-to-MQL conversion rate is 20%.
HubSpot’s campaign tool ties this to spend through its Contact Lifecycle Cost report. It calculates cost per lifecycle stage by dividing your total campaign spend by the number of contacts who reached each stage. If you spent $2,000 on a campaign that influenced 100 contacts and 10 became customers, your cost per customer from that campaign is $200.
One important detail: the lifecycle stage data in these reports reflects each contact’s current stage, not the stage they were in when the campaign first influenced them. If a contact was a lead during your campaign but has since become a customer, they’ll show up in the customer count. Keep this in mind when analyzing older campaigns, since the numbers may shift over time as contacts progress.
What Counts as a Good Conversion Rate
Conversion rates vary widely depending on the type of page, your industry, and what you’re asking visitors to do. A landing page offering a free ebook will convert at a higher rate than one asking for a demo request, because the commitment level is different.
As a rough benchmark, landing page conversion rates across industries typically fall between 2% and 5%, with strong pages reaching 10% or higher. Blog CTA conversion rates tend to be lower, often under 1%, because blog readers are usually earlier in their research and less ready to act. Email click-through rates, another form of conversion, generally range from 1% to 3%.
Rather than chasing a universal “good” number, compare your conversion rates against your own historical performance. If your landing page converted at 3% last quarter and you’re at 4.5% now, that’s meaningful progress regardless of industry averages. HubSpot’s reporting tools make this kind of over-time comparison straightforward, especially with the custom report builder tracking trends by date.
Improving the Numbers You See
Once you know your conversion rates, the natural next step is optimizing them. A few changes tend to have an outsized impact in HubSpot specifically.
Reducing form fields is one of the most reliable ways to lift landing page conversion rates. Every additional field creates friction. If you’re asking for phone number, company size, and job title on a first-touch offer like an ebook, consider cutting back to just name and email, then using progressive profiling (available in HubSpot’s Marketing Hub) to collect additional information on subsequent visits.
Testing CTA placement and copy also moves the needle. HubSpot lets you A/B test CTAs directly, showing different versions to different visitors and tracking which one converts better. Even small wording changes, like switching from “Download Now” to “Get the Free Guide,” can shift click rates noticeably.
For funnel conversion rates, the lever is usually speed and relevance of follow-up. Contacts who receive a personalized email within minutes of converting on a form are far more likely to move to the next lifecycle stage than those who wait days. HubSpot workflows can automate this follow-up based on the form submitted, the page visited, or the contact’s existing properties.