Landing pages are the starting point for most of your marketing efforts, and they can be a powerful tool to help you bring in new customers. But how do you know if your landing page is doing its job?
Here are seven metrics to evaluate and optimise the performance of your landing pages:
1. Bounce Rate
Bounce rate measures the ratio of site visitors who leave your page without visiting any other page on your website. If you have a bounce rate higher than 50%, only half of your visitors stay on your page to see other content.
The main reason people leave a web page is that they don't find what they're looking for or feel confused by the design of the page or its content. The first step in optimising your landing page is to make sure that you understand what visitors are trying to get from their visit and then create content around their needs so that it's easy for them to find what they want when they arrive on your site.
2. Traffic Volume
Traffic volume, or the number of visitors your landing page receives, is an important metric to monitor. If you have a large traffic volume but a low conversion rate, it's time to evaluate and optimise your landing page. Optimisation can help you increase qualified leads and sales.
While measuring how many visitors are landing on your pages is important, it's essential to analyse what they're doing when they get there. For example: Do they waste time looking at other parts of your website? Or do they immediately reach out with questions?
For companies to determine if their content is effective, they must first understand how much traffic they receive from each channel. By assessing these numbers regularly, businesses can better anticipate which channels will be useful for reaching new customers in the future.
It's common for websites to use MySQL to store their data, including the number of visitors to your site, how many times they've visited, and how long they stayed on the site. To get this information from your website's MySQL database, you need to write a query to retrieve it for you.
It's a popular choice for web applications because MySQL hosts are affordable, easy to use, and powerful enough for most applications. You can get a shared host for as little as a few dollars per month from some providers. The less you spend on your hosting provider, the more money you'll have available to spend on improving your landing pages. MySQL can be installed on your computer or hosted in the cloud and makes it easy to create and manage databases from your browser or mobile device.
3. Click-Through Rate (CTR)
CTR is crucial for understanding how users interact with your landing page. The higher your click-through rate, the more effective your website can convert visitors into leads or customers.
To optimize this metric, consider improving either the "clickable areas" on your site or ad copy itself if you're using paid advertising such as Google AdWords or Facebook Ads.
4. Conversion Rate
The conversion rate depicts visitors who complete the desired action as a ratio to the total number of visitors. A key performance indicator (KPI) tells you how many people accomplish what you're trying to accomplish with your landing page. The more conversions, the better your results.
If you are looking for more traffic on your site, start by optimising one or two elements of this metric based on this framework:
- Ensure all calls-to-action are easy for users to find and understand
- Make sure there's only one main call-to-action per webpage
5. Pages Per Session
A high pages-per-session number signifies that your landing page is engaging and provides value to visitors. A low number indicates that visitors aren't finding what they were looking for on your landing page, or it may be too long and overwhelming. You can use this metric to evaluate how well you provide information about each resource on the page.
6. Average Session Duration
The average session duration metric is the average time for a visitor to complete one visit to your site and is obtained by dividing the total number of sessions on your site by the number of visitors and multiplying that by 1,000 in seconds.
7. Inbound Links
Inbound links are a sign of trust in your brand, the quality of your site's content, popularity, and authority. They're also a signal that people find value in what you have to offer. In particular, they show that other sites see value in linking back to your content.
Search engines use links as an aspect of relevance when ranking websites, and if another site links to one of yours and has good rankings, you're more likely to rank higher in search results for relevant keywords than if no one linked back to it at all.
Conclusion
If you want to optimise your landing page, you need to understand which metrics help evaluate its performance and which ones aren't. You will know what needs to be changed to improve the landing page's conversion rate.