So, your landing page is live and you want to know how it performs, right? Well, you have landed just on the right page as we will discuss all the necessary performance metrics you should be focusing on at the moment. We assume that you have coupled your website and landing pages with Google Analytics, as it generates all the useful performance-related information and well, it’s free to use. Let’s dive into the content and discuss the different performance metrics that help measure the impact of a landing page on a marketing campaign.
Landing page views
The fundamental performance metric you want to measure is Views. After all, you want to know how many times people landed on your landing page and went through the content. It’s easy to find the data in Google Analytics, as all you have to do is navigate to Behavior, then Site Content, and then Pages. Find the URL of your landing page in the All Pages view, and click to open the associated report.
What does the report show? It consists of several key performance metrics related to your landing page. Notice the metrics like page views, unique page views, average time on page, entrances, bounce rate, percent exit, page value, and more. Focus on page views as it primarily shows the number of times your landing page has been viewed. Deconstruct the metric by looking at the patterns in the chart. Use the charts to learn different periods when people visited the landing page.
Sessions by source
But, where are all these people coming from? Marketing managers understand the importance of running cross-channel marketing campaigns. Without analysis, it will be quite challenging to figure out the source that contributes the most to the landing page’s success. Moreover, it helps understand which sources work for your marketing strategy. For instance, you will want to know whether a landing page receives traffic just from organic reach or it benefits from the paid campaigns too.
Most importantly, you will want to analyse the landing page sessions to identify the promotional channels working for you, especially if you are running lead generation campaigns. How to analyse sessions by sources on Google Analytics? Just navigate to Behavior, then Site Content, and then All Pages. Find your landing page’s URL in All Pages and click on it. To analyse traffic sources, you will have to add a secondary dimension.
Goal completions/conversions
Landing page conversions are another helpful performance metric that allows marketing managers to notice how many people visited a landing page and took action like completing a form, clicking a link, etc. However, you will have to create a conversion goal in Google Analytics before collecting the information. Google Analytics will track the conversion goal for your campaign if you connect the goal to the landing page’s thank-you page.
Once set up, you can easily track the number of conversions for a particular landing page and calculate its conversion rate. Just navigate to Conversions, then Goals, and then Overview. Here, you’d want to look for the associated goal. Google Analytics generates goal-oriented performance metrics like goal completions, goal value, goal conversion rate, total abandonment rate, and more.
Visitors-to-contact ratio
One thing that makes paid marketing super powerful for marketing managers is its ability to generate results through reverse engineering. You can easily establish a visitor-to-contact ratio and work your way back to create authentic campaign goals. Why is this crucial? Well, it’s important to establish the number of leads you need to have at the end of the campaign.
When established before launching the campaign, Google Analytics will measure the number of contacts the campaign is generating over time and figure out whether or not you are reaching your potential. It helps determine if you have enough visitors to reach the set campaign goals. Keep driving the number of visitors required to reach the generate a set number of leads and render the campaign successful.
Average time on page
What’s the point of carefully crafting the landing page’s content when nobody consumes it? It’s crucial that people visiting the landing page spend enough time to consume the content, consider its educational value, and grasp the information or message you are trying to convey. Therefore, you should pay enough attention to how long visitors stay on your landing page. In marketing terms, we call it the ‘average time on page.’
How can you find the average time of page metric? Just go to Google Analytics and navigate to Behavior, then Site Content, and then All Pages. Here, look for the landing page URL and click on it. Google Analytics will display a report that will have the required average time of page metric. Check the score. If it is high, it’s a good signal. However, if the average time people spend on the page is low, you may want to consider changing or improving the page’s content.
Bounce rate
Here’s a metric that, sometimes, makes online marketing a nightmare for marketing managers. Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors that land on your page, but leave without visiting another page or spending enough time on it. Here’s what you need to remember — a high bounce rate signals Google that your campaign isn’t worth it. You need to work to ensure the landing page’s bounce rate remains as low as possible.
A high bounce rate generally means that the content on the landing page isn’t appealing enough, or not what the visitors expected. The content didn’t encourage them to take the desired action, i.e., to download or complete a form. Not just that, a high bounce rate might mean that your campaign’s offer isn’t resonating with the target audience or the offer was not clear enough. As a result, they were not sure if they should take action.
If your landing page receives a high bounce rate, spend time improving your offer and messaging. How to find the bounce rate? Just go to Google Analytics and navigate to Behavior, then Site Content, and All Pages. Find the landing page URL in All Pages and click on it. Look for the landing page’s bounce rate metric in the displayed report.
Pages per session
You can fetch a lot of information about your landing page and overall campaign just by checking the average number of pages people visit per session. This performance metric shows whether or not the landing page provides enough information to the visitors to help them make a buying decision.
For example, campaigns that involve pillar pages should have low ‘pages per session,’ which shows that the content on the page contains enough valuable information. Do you have an educational landing page? Well, you’d NOT want people to visit too many pages to get what they need to convert. In other words, you should aim to bring down the number of ‘pages per session.’
How can you track pages per session? Just head to Google Analytics and navigate to Behavior, then Site Content, and Landing Pages. Find your landing page URL and click on it. Look for the Pages/Session column to check the performance metric.
Top pages by pageviews
The last metric you’d want to gauge to determine the landing page’s performance is ‘Top Pages by Page Views.’ In other words, you’d want to know how the landing page performs when compared to other high-performance pages on a website.
This performance metric is quite helpful for marketing managers trying to monitor a number of campaigns or landing pages, all at once. The information regarding the pages’ performance allows them to make better resource allocation decisions.
You can look for this information in Google Analytics by navigating to Behavior, then Site Content, and All Pages. Here, you will find the number of page views for all the site’s pages. You may put the pages in order so that it is easier to make the necessary conclusions.
Final remarks!
Proper landing page performance measurement brings you closer to success. After all, you get to work with definitive data which helps check whether or not the strategies are working. We highly recommend you keep a close eye on the performance metrics mentioned above. Also, don’t forget to check out other informative posts on the blog!
If you need some tips on how to make your lead generation campaign a hit, check out his post
