3 landing page management metrics

You know the metrics for landing page performance — primarily conversion rate, but also ROI and ROAS. But how do you measure the performance of your organization when it comes to producing landing pages and post-click marketing experiences?

Here are 3 landing page management metrics by which to benchmark your organization:

Landing Pages: Days-to-Launch (LP-DTL). The number of calendar days it takes your organization to launch a new landing page or conversion path, from concept to completion. When the idea to do a specific landing page first arises, that’s when you start the clock; all the design, development, testing, approval, etc. is what happens in the middle; when the page is deployed to start receiving traffic, that’s when you stop the clock. You can average this across certain campaigns and segments or across your organization as a whole.

Landing Pages: Pages-per-Quarter (LP-PPQ). The total number of new landing pages launched in a quarter. This includes both completely new pages, as well as variations to existing pages to incrementally test improvements; if you’re not doing enough innovative or incremental launches, it can help to track each of those categories separately as well.

Landing Pages: Days-Since-Launch (LP-DSL). The number of calendar days since you last launched a landing page, again either completely new or as an iterative test. So if that last landing page you launched was 4 weeks ago, your LP-DSL is ~28.

These first two metrics, LP-DTL and LP-PPQ, can be analyzed over time, quarter by quarter, to see how your company is improving against its own track record. The last metric, LP-DSL, is more of a current dashboard metric, intended to keep people focused on the mission of continuous improvement and renewal of post-click marketing — keep it fresh and relevant to your organization, your advertising, and your overall market.

Improving these metrics — or more accurately, the capabilities in your organization which are measured by these metrics — is one of the best ways for you to systematically improve the performance of individual pages. Conversion rates are a derivative of an organization’s post-click marketing capabilities.

Comments

[Tim Bay]

Excellent point. Too often companies lack the commitment or resources to follow through to add new pages or analyze the performance of and optimize existing landing pages.

[Cisco Adler]

Very interesting benchmarks. A unique approach to gauging an organization's landing page health and efficiency. It will be interesting to follow companies that rank high based on these metrics and determine the correlation between high rankings and ongoing conversion and brand value.

Cisco

[Scott Brinker]

Hi, Cisco. The empirical evidence from our client base definitely shows correlation between those benchmarks and conversion rate improvement. Causation is harder to prove, of course, but it seems a plausible hypothesis:

Keeping pre-click and post-click marketing in sync, quickly, helps conversion rates (that whole "message match" thing).

Agility in pursuing new opportunities gives you the chance to go after high-performance niches that wouldn't otherwise be feasible to address.

Having the ability to run more experiments, and via portfolio theory, pick the best winners from a larger set of contenders, will let you select higher conversion rate performers.

To be sure, having the ability to rapidly create post-click experiences still requires you to create good post-click experiences. But if you're going to invest in your capabilities, you certainly have the incentive to leverage them.