Landing pages have one primary goal: to make visitors take action. This “action” can be buying a product or service, signing up for an email newsletter, or entering the visitor’s personal information into a web form. When a landing page fails to achieve this goal, it can be disheartening to say the least. But the good news is that you can optimize your landing pages for a stronger response by monitoring some key metrics.
Total Page Views
As the name suggests, total page views is the total amount of visitors who’ve seen your landing page. Generally speaking, the more page views your landing page has, the more sales/conversions it will generate. But this isn’t the only metric that you should be watching. There are several others worth analyzing, some of which hold even greater influence over the success of a landing page.
Traffic Sources
By monitoring the traffic sources of your landing page, you’ll be able to see exactly where visitors are coming from. Why is this important? Well, not all traffic sources are going to yield sales. Visitors from one source may purchase your product or otherwise take action on the landing page, whereas visitors from another traffic source may not take action. Common traffic sources may include search engines like Google and Bing, as well as Facebook, Twitter, direct type-ins, and referral traffic from other websites.
Bounce Rate
A lesser-known metric that’s used to measure the effectiveness of a landing page is bounce rate. Not to be confused with exit rate, bounce rate refers to the percentage of a landing page’s visitors who leave (AKA bounce) without clicking through to a second page on the site. If one third of your landing page’s visitors click the back button in their browser without accessing a second page, your landing page has a 33.3% bounce rate. Keep in mind that a high bounce rate isn’t always bad, however. Assuming your landing page is just a single page with a CTA button linked to a checkout page on an external website, it’s perfectly fine to have a high bounce rate. But if your landing page has multiple internal pages in its sales funnel, you’ll want to keep the bounce rate low.
Conversion Rate
Arguably, the single most important landing page metric is conversion rate. Conversion rate is defined as the percentage of your landing page’s visitors who take action. If 1 out of every 5 visitors proceed to take action, your landing page has a conversion rate of 20%. Internet marketers should constantly work to optimize their landing pages for a higher conversion rate. Making subtle changes to the design, layout, CTA placement or even the color scheme can yield big changes in terms of conversions. So, try to get into the habit of split-testing at least two different versions of your landing page simultaneously. After allowing the two versions to run for a week or so, you can delete the losing version and replace it with a new one.
