Give your site plenty of front doors: Exploring the landing page metric

After working in marketing communications content for so many years, I am admittedly having trouble deprogramming myself from thinking of the “landing page” as another way of saying homepage or at least the main page of a site subsection. As Mark Tietbohl said, this can also refer to different things in lead generation and PPC advertising (2022). 

In web analytics, a landing page is the page where a specific session began—where a user came in first, no matter where they go next. It’s in the category of visit characterization and refers to what digital door any user used. In Google Analytics, this is a dimension as opposed to a metric, so it ends up in a row, not a column, as Avinash Kaushik (2010) explained. This is a specific spot on your site, so you then you drill down into to see how many visits (or sessions) it received, the average time a user spent on the page, bounce rate, conversion rate, and much more (see fig. 1). 

Figure 1: A Yahoo! Web Analytics report shows page URLs as a dimension, where the columns for visits and average clicks are metrics (Kaushik, 2010).

This is illustrated clearly by Learn Digital Advertising’s video on landing pages (2019), which also points out that looking at raw landing page data may not help you as much as you think. If you narrow down where the traffic to landing pages came from, then you can see not only what doors are opening, but why your visitors knocked on them in the first place. To do this requires segmentation.

Segmenting landing page data

As Jeff Sauer (2020) wrote, Google Analytics’ landing page report can be the “BFF for content marketers” since you can see the pages that are the most trafficked pages and have the highest conversion rates (where visitors become leads or customers). To give the GA landing page data context, you can combine the landing page report with Source/Medium data as a secondary dimension. For example, you can see the top traffic sources (see fig. 2). 

Figure 2: A landing page report with the source/medium dimension added allows you to see which landing page has the most sessions, longest session duration, and more (Sauer, 2020).

Raw numbers are heartening to see, though it’s good to scroll over a few rows to see if all that traffic is resulting in high bounce rates, low average session times, or high conversion rates. These can be good or bad signs, depending on context. As with all web metrics, context is key, and by segmenting and sorting the data in a few ways, truths can come to light. 

As an example, you know your social media team has been promoting a holiday special on Instagram all week, along with a paid Facebook ad campaign. Is one of them doing better than the other? How do either or both of them stack up to the metrics from searches, referrals, or direct traffic (where someone types in your URL) (Jones, 2021)? 

You can also drill down to individual landing pages and look at metrics over time, such as how the conversion rate on a page has gone up or down, perhaps related to content marketing, PPC campaigns, or seasonal trends more broadly (Sauer, 2020). You can also identify pages with high bounce rates and consider adding a more visible call to action button or using a popup to invite visitors to subscribe or sign up for a discount code (Skow, 2021). 

Thanks for reading! How can you see using the landing page report in Google Analytics to drive digital strategy? What pitfalls can you see falling into by looking at only one dimension or metric? 

 

References

Jones, M. (2021, Oct. 14). How many visitors should your site get? HubSpot Blog. Retrieved from https://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/5092/how-many-visitors-should-your-site-get.aspx 

Kaushik, A. (2010, Apr. 19). Web analytics 101: Definitions: Goals, metrics, KPIs, dimensions, targets. Occam’s Razor. Retrieved from https://www.kaushik.net/avinash/web-analytics-101-definitions-goals-metrics-kpis-dimensions-targets/ 

Learn Digital Advertising. (2019, Sept. 16). How to analyze landing pages with Google Analytics [YouTube video]. Retrieved from https://youtu.be/RI5FSxo0TYM 

Sauer, J. (2020, Mar. 23). How to maximize the Google Analytics landing page report. Data Driven. Retrieved from https://www.datadrivenu.com/google-analytics-landing-page-report/ 

Skow, J. (2021, Sept. 2). How to use the Google Analytics landing pages report. MonsterInsights. Retrieved from https://www.monsterinsights.com/how-to-use-the-google-analytics-landing-pages-report/ 

Tietbohl, M. (2022, Jan. 22). Discussion 2 and writing assignment 1 [announcement post]. IMC 642: Web Metrics and SEO. Retrieved from https://ecampus.wvu.edu/webapps/blackboard/execute/announcement?method=search&context=mybb&viewChoice=2&course_id=_174310_1&searchSelect=_174310_1 

Comments

  1. AnonymousJanuary 26, 2022 at 8:48 PM

    Laura, you're absolutely right. The landing page report is great for driving digital strategy for so many reasons. It allows the marketer to know where a user visited their page from and even tracks what other pages the user visited once they were on the landing page. Great job breaking down this information! :)

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