A brick-and-mortar store has only 1 front door. But an internet site has as many front doors as websites published. Serps, Bing, Yahoo!, and Ask will make their very own determination as to what door they need to send a possible customer through in accordance with its content.
You can coach se’s with proper optimization techniques, but even for the savviest of SEO practitioners there are not any guarantees. Eventually, it is advisable ensure each page in your website is performing to a high level, as any single one among them is usually a landing page.
In this newsletter, I’ll explain how one can configure Google Analytics to measure the effectiveness of your landing pages. I’ll assume you’ve a service-based business that’s trying to get visitors to fill out either a Quote Request form or a Contact Us form.
I’ll also assume that you’ve establish goal tracking properly in Google Analytics. Goals are what we use to measure the completion of an action, together with reaching the Thanks page of your website after a possible customer has filled out one of the crucial two forms.
Looking at Landing Pages in Google Analytics
The first step is figuring out the pages that website visitors landed on initially. To do this, navigate down the left hand column of Google Analytics to “Content,” then click “Landing Pages.”
Google Analytics content menu.
This pulls up a listing of all pages viewed. These will always be the 1st page a visitor sees. One of the vital first things to take a look at is “Bounce Rate.”
A Bounce Rate that may be very high could indicate you’re doing something wrong on that page. Visitors is probably not finding what they’re searching for, and exiting your website without taking the other action.
Bounce Rates vary from page to page. As an example, if a visitor comes into your website on a key term like “phone number for ‘your company,’” lands for your Contact Us page, after which bounces, you’re fine with that. Sure, you need the visitor to browse around a piece, but when he achieved the point of the visit and called you, a one-page visit is barely fine.
However, if visitors come on a search term like “free service quote” after which bounce, you likely have a difficulty. The capability client is absolutely not liking what she saw, and exiting immediately. This could be a hallmark that this landing page needs some work. It is usually an easy fix, or it would be more complex.
Next, examine the goal conversion rate for the foremost landing pages. To try this, use the Explorer Menu near the highest menu bar.
The default view is Site Usage; that’s the only you were using to locate the Bounce Rate. When you have just a few goals installation, you’ll likely only have active goals in Goal Set 1, so click there. Google Analytics will display links for “Goal Set” 1 through 4, in addition to “Ecommerce” regardless in the event that they apply to you or not.
Goal Set 1 in Google Analytics.
The first three columns during this view are where you discover out the effectiveness of a landing page.
- Landing Page
- Visits
- Goal Conversion Rate
“Landing Page” is the URL of the page in question. “Visits” is the choice of those who came to that page first. “Goal Conversion Rate” is the share of these visits that filled out a sort or completed some other variety of goal you’ve install.
As you will discover within the screenshot below, Goal Conversion Rate varies from page to page. (I’ve blurred the particular URLs from this report.)
Goal conversion rates will vary from page to page.
This is extremely actionable data. The better the Goal Conversion Rate, the simpler. It’s important to set a target for these figures, and constantly review the underperforming pages to come to a decision the issues.
Generally, for sites that depend upon web forms to be completed if you want to gain customers, underperforming pages be afflicted by a brief list of issues:
- Unclear or sparse information regarding the services or products;
- Lack of a concise call to action;
- The form is simply too long or complicated;
- The form doesn’t perform properly on mobile devices;
- General unattractiveness or poor design.
The excellent news is that every one of those issues could be corrected. Nonetheless it takes accurate data to expose what pages need the foremost work, after which prioritize these corrections.