What is CVR (Conversion Rate)?

CVR (conversion rate) is the percentage of visitors or clickers who complete the action you care about, usually a purchase. It measures how well traffic turns into customers once the ad has done its job.

Formula: CVR = (Conversions / Clicks or Sessions) x 100

How it works

Where CTR grades the ad, CVR grades everything after the click: landing page, offer, price, load speed, and how well the ad's promise matches the page. The same traffic at double the CVR halves your acquisition cost, which is why CVR improvements compound harder than most media-buying tweaks. It also varies heavily by traffic temperature — retargeting converts differently than cold prospecting, so compare like with like.

What to watch

• Good: CVR holds steady or improves as you scale spend to colder audiences
• Bad: strong CTR paired with poor CVR — a message mismatch between ad and landing page
• Bad: CVR that differs wildly between creatives on the same page — some ads attract low-intent clickers

In practice

Creative sets up CVR by pre-selling the right expectation, so test angles that qualify the buyer, not just ones that win clicks. With Polaris you can generate multiple angle variations directly inside Claude and see which framing sends clickers who actually buy. See the full ecommerce ads glossary, or put it into practice with the Polaris AI UGC ad generator.