Beginner's Guide to Landing Page Analytics

Think back to the day you first saw your data populated in Google Analytics. It was an overwhelming experience, right? There is a lot of stuff to analyze in there and maybe you were giddy with excitement or intimidated by it all. It takes a while to digest the many great insights when you’re just starting out, but it doesn’t have to be completely confusing.

You can use analytics to tell you four important things about your landing page traffic: the amount, source, nature and results. 

The Amount: Track the overall number of visitors, unique visitors, page views.

The Source: Track where your traffic is coming from including search, ads, and inbound links.

The Nature: Pages per visit, most popular content, pages with high bounce rates, etc

The Results: Metrics on goal completion and conversion rates. 

Before we go on, let’s just talk about conversion rates for a second. There is some confusion over how to determine a conversion rate, but it’s really quite simple. All you do is divide your total number of visitors by the number who take your desired action. 

So if you’re receiving 100 visitors a day, and 10 of them convert, your conversion rate is 10%.

Now, when looking at all the information in your analytics application, you will want to consider three different traffic types: aggregate, segmented, and individual.  

Aggregate: A aggregate roll up of all of your traffic (including amount, source, nature, results).

Segmented: Looking at traffic in groups. Some ways to begin segmenting are by source, campaign, geo-location and time of day. So, rather than looking looking at your overall conversion rate, you might look at just your PPC conversion rate. Then, of course your conversion rate by individual engine. And by ad campaign. And ad group. And even by keyword. You can stay high level, or get really granular when segmenting your analytics. 

Individual: Looking at individual user behavior. Individual behavior is really helpful for sales teams and marketing automation platforms are doing a great job at giving insight into this data.

At the basic level, some of the first things to analyze and optimize are:

• Number of visitors
• Bounce rate
• Goal completion or conversion rate
• Cost per acquisition
• Revenue (or value) per conversion, if you know it

Once you get the hang of tracking the above data, you should move on to more advanced metrics like geo-trends and media types. 

If you’re new to analytics, print out this post to keep it handy. If you’re an analytics pro, leave a comment and tell us what you think should be added for beginners!