What's normal?

I realise this is a general (and possibly stupid) question, but roughly what conversion rate would people say was "reasonable" for a site with general shopping / services links? I have a trickle of visitors, but I don't know how to judge performance even very generally. Is 1 sale out of 10 visitors normal, or 1 out of 100, or 1,000...??? I know it varies per shop, etc. and loads of other factors, but if someone could give me a ball-park figure this would certainly help.

1 sale per 100 visitors sent to a site is my benchmark. Some will do much better than this (though rarely better than 1 in 10).

Poor conversions are not just down to the merchant though - it depends on your sales copy, where you send them (home/deep link) and the relevance of your site to the product.

For exmple I get >10% conversion for one merchant that others dont seem to get 0.1% for. The reason is that my site and this merchant are a perfect match, whereas others sites are not.

I have merchants where 1 in 4 people I send result in a sale/lead but I also have other merchants where is can take a few hundred per sale.

That's the problem I see, sometime hear folk slating a program because it's not doing anything for them, the program it's self might not be bad at all, just they couldn't convert with it.

As an example on DGM they have a Cottage rental site, I fell I could send them thousands of people from my site and never make a sale, not because they have dodge tracking but because it's not a fit to what I do at all. So benchmarks really are hard unless you get together with a bunch of sites they same as you and share data you will never know (not like your going to do that now are you).

On another note, I found something bizarre in my logs, I am number 1 in Google for "cottages" got no idea why as I have never had a link, banner or text on my site for "cottages" however if they keep showing up I am going to have to stick a link in see if I can make some money out of this freak position

supercod - that's a strange one!

although if you check the backlinks for your site there are dozens and dozens of travel and holiday sites that appear but don't seem to link to you at all.....

I know go figure that one out.. my PR rates took a pounding, and I have this very bad felling that Google database got corrupt some how and mixed my data up with another site.. then again who knows as my traffic levels look normal every place... you live and learn, then learn some more, then a week later have to forget all you learned and start again

Thanks for the replies - that puts it a bit more in perspective for me. <img src=http://www.gamers-forums.com/smilies/contrib/ruinkai/biggthumpup.gif ALT=":thumb">