Thanks to Google Analytics, it’s never been easier than it is now to track the performance of your landing pages. And no matter the reasons why you have built a website, you need to understand why your site metrics are important.
In this article, we introduce you to the landing page metrics that matter and explain what they mean, how to use them, and how they can increase the value of the leads you obtain from your website.
Why do Landing Page Metrics matter?
Simply, if you ignore your landing page metrics, you will struggle to improve and grow your website. Metrics provide you with valuable insights into the behavior of your site visitors, which you can use to your advantage.
Six Landing Page Metrics that Matter
Below, we look at six landing page metrics that matter and explain how they can potentially help you increase the value of the leads that you obtain.
1. Conversion Rate
The objective of most landing pages on the internet is to obtain useful information from the web user. This can then be turned into a useful lead, which will hopefully contribute to your bottom line. The conversion rate deals with how many times someone visits your website and takes action. So, if your goal is to get people to sign up for a newsletter, your conversion rate is how many times someone visits your site and fills in the form.
The number is given as a percentage of users that take the desired action. Currently, the average conversion rate for landing pages is around 2.35%. However, the top websites shoot for conversion rates that exceed 11%, so your target should be somewhere in between. Your conversion rate is influenced by a number of factors, including your web traffic, online presence, the speed of your site, and the nature of your landing page. Understanding your conversion rate is vital, as it gives you valuable insight into what actions people take on your site.
By analyzing your conversion rate, you can take the necessary steps to optimize your site and increase the likelihood of people taking the desired actions when they visit your site.
2. Bounce Rate
Again, given as a percentage, your bounce rate is the number of people who leave your site after viewing just one page. To facilitate a decent level of conversions, your bounce rate needs to be relatively low.
A high bounce rate is indicative of the fact that people visit your site, and it is not what they expected, prompting them to leave without taking action. However, in some instances, a high bounce rate might indicate that a user got what they needed from your site. This is pertinent to blogs focused on providing specific answers to search queries, for instance.
But if you’re trying to market a product or service, a high bounce rate isn’t a good thing. It indicates that your landing page probably hasn’t delivered on its promise, or perhaps that it is unappealing to the visitors to your site. The average bounce rate sits at around 40.5%. So, you can use this as a benchmark to see how well your website is performing and take the necessary steps to lower your bounce rate as a result.
3. Page Views
If you’re looking for a statistic that is easy to ingest, then the number of page views is a good place to get started. It’s also a helpful statistic to see how good your website is at attracting traffic. By using Google Analytics, you can identify which of your website’s pages are getting the most and least amount of traffic. This metric is crucial if you’re running PPC ads on your site, as it will dictate how much you’re able to earn.
If certain pages are performing better than others - which is typical on all sites - you can undertake an interlinking campaign on your site. This is the practice of integrating internal links on specific pages of your site to spread out your traffic. You need to make sure that the content on the linked pages is relevant to your current page, but it’s an effective way of increasing the number of page views on some of the underserved pages on your website.
4. Average Time on Page
Looking at how long a visitor spends on a specific page on your site is undoubtedly helpful. After all, if they’re only on one page for a matter of seconds, it’s typically not enough time for them to take the desired action. The best way to increase the amount of time someone spends on a page is to enhance the quality of the content. Sometimes, landing pages are deliberately sparse on content, and this is okay, provided you are able to direct your users to other pages.
If people bounce off your website without visiting multiple pages, it could be a sign that your content isn’t what they were expecting, so it might be necessary to invest in a better level of content for your audience.
5. Sessions by Source
Knowing where your website visitors come from is really helpful when developing campaigns and launching products and services. This allows you to optimize content and offers based on where your audience comes from. For example, if a significant proportion of your web visitors come from Facebook, it’s a sign that your Facebook ads are working. Therefore, it’s a good idea to invest more in the ads on that particular social media outlet.
You can also identify the sources that aren’t working particularly well for you. This allows you to pivot your marketing strategy and focus on different online sources. As you will be aware, the more sources you can use to attract users to your website, the better.
6. Form Abandonment
If one of the objectives of your site is to obtain information from your customers, then you should look at the data relating to form abandonment on your site. As it suggests, this metric refers to how many users started filling in the form before leaving your site.
There are lots of reasons why users might abandon the form, so it’s helpful to look at the potential causes. For instance, it might be because your form is too long, or perhaps because you’re asking for information that users consider to be insensitive or unnecessary.
Make sure you have a legitimate reason for asking for the details in your forms, and don’t ask for something for the sake of it. This makes it less likely that users will leave your site before completing the form on your landing page.
Final Thoughts
Engaging with landing page metrics that matter is crucial if you want to grow and evolve your site. After putting in all that hard work to launch your site in the first place, fine-tuning it by diving into your metrics will help you put out fires and improve the content that you share.
We hope that you now have a good understanding of these six key metrics and can take the first steps toward improving the way that your users experience your website.