1: Conversion Rate – Measuring Success
Conversion rate is the North Star of landing page success metrics. Also known as “landing page click through rate”, it is undoubtedly the most important of the landing page metrics to track. And that’s because it tells you if your landing page is successful at doing what it’s meant to do, which is to convert visitors into leads!
In other words, conversion rate tells you the percentage of visitors who take a desired action on your landing page. Depending on the purpose of your landing page, the action desired out of visitors will vary, and it could be anything from making a purchase to simply providing an email address, from signing up to a newsletter to downloading an ebook or other similar resource.
Conversion rate is calculated like this: the total number of visitors divided by the number of conversions, and multiplied by a 100 to give us a percentage. The average conversion rate is 2.35%, but websites at the top of the food chain see conversion rate of 11.45% and beyond. The higher your conversion rate, the more successful your landing page is.
Therefore, understanding this metric is fundamental to your marketing success. But understanding is not enough: you are going to need to optimize your landing page in order to improve your conversion rate. Optimizations will differ depending on your niche or industry, but some good optimizations include improving your CTAs, making your forms shorter, or writing a catchier heading.
2: Bounce Rate – Keeping Visitors Engaged
Landing page bounce rate is the metric that essentially tells you how engaging your landing page is. And this is because bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who land on your page and then quickly navigate away without taking any action—in other words, they “bounce” from your page.
A high bounce rate should act like a red flag telling you that your landing page is not meeting visitor expectations—otherwise, why else would they be bouncing from your page? There are several reasons for having a high bounce rate, including:
- the page design is unappealing to users
- the landing page layout and the ad they clicked on don’t match
- the CTA is difficult to find or it’s hidden
- the landing page doesn’t deliver on what was promised to the user
- the copy of the landing page is too long or it has lengthy form to fill in
- the landing page is loading too slowly
However, don’t worry about seeing a percentage that you might think is high. In fact, according to Neil Patel, the average bounce rate is actually 40.5%. So, that’s like saying that 4 out of every 10 visitors bounce away from your page. So, don’t worry too much about having a seemingly high bounce rate.
Nevertheless, you should always strive to reduce your bounce rate as much as possible, and there are a number of things that you can do to achieve this including improve your landing page’s loading speed; making your CTA or form more prominent; aligning your landing page with your ad; or improving the quality of your offer.
3: Page Views – Understanding Popularity
Landing page views are one of the simplest yet insightful metrics. Indeed, from all the landing page metrics that matter, page views is second only to conversion rate, and you can reasonably understand why: it counts how many times your landing page has been viewed.
By tracking page views, you can gauge the popularity of your content; which landing pages are driving most traffic and which are driving the least; as well as the times of day or the day in the week when landing page views seem to receive a boost.
In short: by analyzing your page views, you should be able to infer if there are any external factors that affect your page views and also understand which of your landing pages require optimization.
When it comes to landing page view optimization, there isn’t much you can do outside of the usual optimization SEM techniques. Depending if you’re using PPC, SEO, email campaigns, or social media to market your landing page, you might need to increase efforts in one, or all, of these channels.
4: Top Pages by Page Views – Your Marketing MVPs
Similar to the page views metric, the top pages by page views metric tells you which page is performing the best out of all of your pages. This metric might not be valuable to everyone, especially if you only have one or a few landing pages active.
In other words, the top pages by page views metric is useful for marketers that are running multiple landing pages and need to track their performance at a glance. By understanding which landing page is performing best, you can increase efforts to market that landing page in order to increase page views and (hopefully) conversions.
On the other hand, you can look at the losers from this metric and diagnose why those landing pages are not performing well. This way, you can tackle problems in your marketing strategy holistically and also be able to strategise much more intelligently.
5: Average Time on Page – Engagement in Seconds
Average time on page is a metric that provides valuable insights into how engaged your visitors are. However, it’s essential to interpret this metric in the right context, as out of all of the landing page marketing metrics, this might be one of the most context-sensitive.
This is because, as the name implies, average time on page tells you how long users were on your page on the whole. Depending on the nature of your landing page and your industry, this will differ greatly. For example, a low average time on page might be fantastic if your landing page is very simple and conversion-oriented.
However, it might a cause for concern if your landing page is meant to engage users over a relatively long page. In this case, you need to check the content on your landing page and see if there is a lot of unnecessary words or if you could possibly insert more media, like pictures or a video.
Thus, it’s important to bear in mind the goals of your landing page when viewing this metric, as well as to cross-referesnce it with conversion rate. It won’t matter if your average time on page is low if your conversion rate is good. And, for the curious stats nerds amongst you: the average time on page is just under 60 seconds: 54 seconds to be exact.
On a final note, it’s also important to differentiate between average time on page and session duration: while average time on page tells you how long users spent on a specific page, session duration tells you how much time users spend across your whole website. Both of these metrics are important, but the former is more useful in the context of landing page.
6: Sessions by Source – Knowing Where They Come From
Understanding where your traffic originates from is fundamental for effective marketing, and this will become amply clear once we explain why.
While this cannot be considered one of the metrics for landing page success, like conversion rate is, sessions by source break down the number of visitors to your landing page from different channels such as search engines, social media, and paid advertising.
Understanding which of your marketing channels are the most successful and which ones are the least is paramount if you want to do any kind of marketing and optimization. If one of your marketing channels is generating a lot of revenue, you might want to consider investing more in that channel in order to boost profits.
On the other hand, if you have a marketing channel that is underperforming, you might want to increase efforts in that channel; otherwise, if that channel remains unprofitable no matter what you do, you should consider removing it from your general marketing strategy.
At the end of the day, you want more bang for your buck, and the sessions by source metric can help you with that.
7: Cost Per Conversion – Efficient Spending
Speaking of bang for your buck, this next metric will tell you exactly that: cost per conversion reveals how much you’re spending to acquire each new lead or customer through your landing page. It’s a critical metric for optimizing your spending and ensuring that your marketing efforts are cost-effective.
While you want to increase spending in order to attract more customers, and thus increase your revenue as a result, you don’t to do this at an astronomical cost to your business, especially if the returns are meager in the end. You might end up hitting a point of diminishing returns, for example.
Finally, to calculate your cost per conversion rate, all you need to do is divide your total cost for marketing a particular landing page by the total number of conversions generated by that landing page.
8: Form Abandonment – Fixing Leaky Forms
This next metric is an easy one to decude: form abandonment measures the percentage of visitors who start filling out a form but then abandon it before completion. Since forms are common elements on landing pages, keeping an eye out for how many people started filling out your form but abandoned it halfway is important for landing page optimization.
There are a handful of reasons why users might give up filling in a form all the way, including:
- your form requests too many sensitive details
- your form is too long
- your form is asking for irrelevant information
- your form is not at all easy to fill in
Bear in mind that your form needs to be user-friendly and relevant to the scope of the landing page. For instance, what’s the point of asking for a user’s address if your landing page is about getting them to sign up to a newsletter?
9: Return vs. New Visitors – Nurturing Relationships
This is another straightforward metric to figure out: return vs. new visitors tells you the ratio of visitors who have already been on your landing page as opposed to those who are visiting for the first time. Thus, return vs. new visitors offers insights into visitor engagement.
On its own, this metric doesn’t give you many insights beyond understanding which part of your audience is new. However, when coupled with the other metrics mentioned in this article, you can extract some valuable insights which can provide powerful opportunities for landing page optimization.
For example, if your returning visitors have a high bounce rate, then there is something lacking with your landing page: these visitors keep coming back to your page but are leaving almost as soon as they arrive. This is a sign that you need to improve the quality of your landing page.
On the other hand, if you find that you have many more new visitors than returning visitors, you might want to sweeten the deal a little more by offering a small promo in order to entice these visitors to come again in the future.
FAQs
What is landing page conversion rate?
Landing page conversion rate is one of the most important metrics out there as it directly measures landing page performance. This is because it measures how many of the visitors on your landing page have actually performed the desired action, whether that’s downloading an online resource or redeeming a promo.
What is a good conversion rate for landing pages?
Average conversion rates will vary across industries. Moreover, big brands will naturally get higher conversion rates than smaller companies. However, the average convesion rate, according to WordStream, is 2.35%. A conversion rate around this percentage would mean that you’re doing well.
What is the most important KPI on a website landing page?
The most important KPI (key performance indicator) that you need to consider is definitely conversion rate. This effectively tells you how well your landing page is doing what it was created to do—that is, convert users. Despite this, the other metrics that we mentioned in our article are also quite important.
How do you track landing page performance?
Other than use the metrics that we mentioned above to determine your landing page’s performance, especially the landing page KPIs that matter most for your business, you will need to use tools like Google Analytics to be able to track these metrics. Other than Google Analytics, you can use alternatives like Hotjar, Semrush, Adobe Analytics, etc.
How do I add tracking to my landing page?
To add tracking to your landing page, you need to first choose an analytics tool that’s right for you. One of the best tools for this is Google Analytics as it’s absolutely free, but there are other tools that you can use which can give you additional insight. Once you’ve chosen a tool and set up your account, you will need to insert a tracking code into the HTML of your landing page. That way, the tools can provide you with insightful landing page performance metrics.
What is landing page experience metric?
Landing page experience is a metric used by Google Ads to evaluate the quality and relevance of a landing page to a user’s search query and the corresponding ad. In other words, it measures how much the landing page aligns with the user’s search intent and the ad they clicked on.
Track These Metrics & Improve Your Campaigns
In conclusion, tracking these nine essential landing page metrics is the cornerstone of successful digital marketing. Each metric offers unique insights into visitor behavior and landing page effectiveness. By understanding these metrics and making data-driven decisions, you can optimize your landing pages for better conversions and achieve your marketing goals.
