Janice Dombrowski
on August 16, 2019 (last modified on April 22, 2021) • 14 minute read
A ton of work goes into planning a marketing campaign, creating a landing page for it, and executing the campaign.
But is all of that work worth it? The only way to know for sure is by having a plan to track the most important landing page metrics—those that help you actively monitor the performance of your campaign.
Whether your landing page is a pillar page for topic cluster content, a gated download for an ebook, or a special offer you’re advertising via PPC ads, Google Analytics can help you track your campaign’s success. And you’ll be happy to know that it’s easier than you think.
To track the results of your landing page campaign, you’ll need to understand:
To appropriately evaluate the success of a marketing campaign that uses a landing page, you should track and monitor the following eight key landing page metrics.
The first step of managing your campaign’s performance is to establish how many times your landing page has been viewed.
You can find this data in Google Analytics by navigating to Behavior > Site Content > All Pages. In the All Pages view, find the URL for your landing page, and click on it.
This will open a report that shows several key metrics for your landing page: pageviews, unique pageviews, average time on page, entrances, bounce rate, percent exit, and page value.
To find out how many times your landing page has been viewed, look at the pageviews metric. Additionally, look for patterns in the chart that shows pageviews by day. Do more people visit during the week or on weekends? What events or promotions triggered spikes or lulls in views?
Knowing where your traffic is coming from is one of the key aspects of landing page analysis. It helps you understand what is and isn’t working for your campaign.
If you are monitoring a pillar page, for example, you’ll want to identify your organic reach and also consider if paid components, like search and social ads, help increase traffic and conversion rates.
If you’re monitoring a lead generation offer, analyzing your landing page sessions can help you see which promotional channels are working for you. Is it blogs, social, or email nurturing? Take whatever works and amplify it.
To find out where the traffic to your landing page is coming from in Google Analytics, navigate to Behavior > Site Content > All Pages. In the All Pages view, find the URL for your landing page, and click on it. Then, add a secondary dimension for Source.
This will add another column to your report showing the source of your landing page visits, plus additional metrics like time on page and bounce rate for each source.
To track conversions on your landing page, you’ll first need to set up goals in Google Analytics. By connecting a goal to the thank-you page of your campaign, you’ll be able to monitor exactly how many people visited your landing page and took action by completing a form, clicking a link, or downloading an offer.
With goals set up for your landing page in Google Analytics, you can track the number of conversions for your landing page and the percentage of visitors who converted. To find this information, navigate to Conversions > Goals > Overview. Look for the name of your goal to see the total number of completions:
In a survey we conducted in April 2019, we asked marketers to tell us their average landing page conversion rate. The average conversion rate from those responses was 26%, so a good landing page conversion rate is anything above 26%.
Editor’s note: If your landing page conversion rates aren’t hitting these numbers, check out these 16 tips that marketers recommend for improving your landing page conversion rates.
Establishing your visitor-to-contact ratio is essential to reverse-engineer your campaign goals.
Before you launch your campaign, you should establish the number of contacts you need at the end of your campaign. Then, measure the number of contacts you are generating over time (via Google Analytics goals or your CRM) to see if you’re converting enough visitors and if you’re on track to reach your goal.
Maintain campaign momentum by consistently driving the number of visitors needed to convert the desired number of prospects into leads.
Monitoring how long visitors stay on your landing page is very important. If you have an educational landing page, for example, knowing that visitors spent time on your page means the information you are providing is valuable.
If your average time on page is very low, you may want to consider improving or lengthening your landing page content.
To find the average time on page for your landing page in Google Analytics, navigate to Behavior > Site Content > All Pages. In the All Pages view, find the URL for your landing page, and click on it. Your average time on page will be displayed in this report.
Bounce rate represents the percentage of people who leave your site after visiting only one page. If your goal is higher conversions, you want to ensure your bounce rate stays low.
If your bounce rate is high, it means the material on your landing page is not what visitors expected, and they were not interested in taking action, downloading your content, or completing a form. A high bounce rate could be telling you a few important things:
To find the bounce rate for your landing page in Google Analytics, navigate to Behavior > Site Content > All Pages. In the All Pages view, find the URL for your landing page, and click on it. Your landing page’s bounce rate will be displayed in this report.
Related: What’s a Good Bounce Rate?
You want to track pages per session to ensure that visitors are getting the information they need to make a buying decision.
Are you using pillar pages? Tracking pages per session can help you determine if your content hub contains enough valuable information.
Using an educational landing page? Too many pages per session may mean they didn’t get what they needed from your main landing page or they just weren’t ready to make a buying decision.
To track pages per session for your landing page in Google Analytics, navigate to Behavior > Site Content > Landing Pages. In the Landing Pages view, find the URL for your landing page and look for the Pages/Session column to see the average number of pages visitors viewed when entering your site through your landing page.
In Google Analytics, a landing page refers to the first page users visited when arriving on your site. The landing page report is a list of all pages that visitors viewed first during their sessions.
Because of this, the landing page report in Google Analytics will contain marketing landing pages, blog posts, knowledgebase entries, and other types of content.
When reviewing the landing page report in Google Analytics, just remember that it’s not exclusively limited to what you would consider a landing page as a marketer. Rather, it’s simply showing all of the pages that your website’s visitors viewed first during their visits.
The last data calculation you may want to consider in your landing page analysis is an overview of how your landing page is performing in relation to all of your other website pages.
This can be especially important if you are monitoring a number of campaigns or landing pages at once and need to determine where to allocate additional budget dollars.
To find your top pages by pageviews in Google Analytics, navigate to Behavior > Site Content > All Pages. By default, the report will list all of your site’s pages in order of most-to-least pageviews, so it’s easy to see how your different landing pages are performing against each other.
In the next section, we’re going to take a look at how to create a data dashboard for tracking your most important landing page metrics. But first, you need to make sure you have goals set up for your landing page in Google Analytics.
To create a goal for your landing page in Google Analytics:
1. Click the Admin tab in Google Analytics’ left navigation menu.
2. In the admin menu, select Goals under the View column.
3. Click the + NEW GOAL button.
4. Select the Template radio button, and click the Continue button.
5. Give your new goal a name, select the Destination radio button, and click Continue.
6. The next screen will ask you to add the URL of the destination that should be considered a goal completion. Most likely, this will be the URL of the thank-you page for your landing page.
For example, say your landing page includes a form. After filling out the form, users are redirected to a thank-you page. If they arrive on that thank-you page, they’ve converted, so visits to that thank-you page should be considered conversions.
7. If you want to add a monetary value to each goal completion, toggle on the Value field and add a dollar amount (optional).
8. Finally, click Save to save your goal and start tracking your landing page conversions.
Now that you are all set up in Google Analytics, it’s time to start building a landing page dashboard in Databox.
Marketing dashboards are an easy way to capture and analyze the data for all of your campaigns. And while Google Analytics offers some robust dashboard templates, having the ability to drag and drop the key metrics you need for each campaign is ideal.
Using a tool like Databox, you can easily create dashboards for landing page campaigns for monitoring, real-time assessment, and sharing.
For example, the Google Analytics Landing Page & Lead Tracking dashboard pictured below is a free template designed with a singular purpose: to track traffic and leads for a landing page.
Using this dashboard is an easy way to track all of your most important landing page metrics in a single, visual, shareable view without having to create custom Google Analytics dashboards or click through multiple screens in Google Analytics to find the data you need.
Here’s how to set up this dashboard in Databox for your next landing page campaign.
Visit the landing page for the Google Analytics Landing Page & Lead Tracking dashboard template, and click the Get Your Dashboard For Free button. If you already have a Databox account, sign in to use the template. If you don’t have a Databox account, you can sign up for one of our free-forever plans.
If it’s your first time using Databox, you’ll be prompted to connect your Google Analytics account to Databox. You’ll need to do this in order for Databox to pull data from Google Analytics.
If you already have a Databox account with Google Analytics connected, just select the appropriate data source.
Initially, your dashboard will show data for your Google Analytics account as a whole, so you’ll need to make some adjustments to narrow the data to show metrics for your landing pages.
Start with the pageviews Datablock. Click the pageviews block to open the settings panel. Then, in the Dimensions dropdown, select your landing page.
The data in the pageview Datablock will refresh to show only pageview data for your landing page.
Click on the Pages/Session Datablock to open the settings panel. Then, click the Metric dropdown, select Custom, and click New Custom Metric.
Give your metric a name, select Pages/Session in the Metric column, and select Landing Page in the Dimensions column. Next, add the date ranges you want to be able to look at in the Date range dropdown. Finally, click the Run query button. If your query is successful, you’ll be able to save your metric.
Now, you can select your landing page in the Dimension dropdown to have this Datablock only show pages per session for your landing page.
Click on the Bounce Rate Datablock to open the settings panel. Then, click the Metric dropdown, select Custom, and click New Custom Metric.
Give your metric a name, select Bounce Rate in the Metric column, and select Landing Page in the Dimensions column. Next, add the date ranges you want to be able to look at in the Date range dropdown. Finally, click the Run query button. If your query is successful, you’ll be able to save your metric.
Now, you can select your landing page in the Dimension dropdown to have this Datablock only show the bounce rate for your landing page.
Click on the Sessions By Source Datablock to open the settings panel. Then, click the Metric dropdown, select Custom, and click New Custom Metric.
Give your metric a name, select Sessions in the Metric column, and select Source in the Dimensions column. Next, add the date ranges you want to be able to look at in the Date range dropdown.
Now, click the Advanced options link to expand the advanced options section.
Under filters, select by Dimension in the Filter dropdown, Landing Page in the Dimension dropdown, and Exact match in the Operator dropdown. For Dimension enter the final portion of your landing page’s URL (i.e. /blog/ rather than https://databox.com/blog/).
Finally, click the Run query button. If your query is successful, you’ll be able to save your metric.
Click on the Pageviews to Goal Datablock to open the settings panel. Then, for the Left metric, click the Metric dropdown and select Pageviews by Page. In the Dimensions dropdown, select your landing page.
For the Right metric, change the Metric to Goal Completions by Goals, and select the goal for your landing page.
Click on the Avg. Session Duration Datablock to open the settings panel. Then, click the Metric dropdown, select Custom, and click New Custom Metric.
Give your metric a name, select Avg. Session Duration in the Metric column, and select Landing Page in the Dimensions column. Next, add the date ranges you want to be able to look at in the Date range dropdown. Finally, click the Run query button. If your query is successful, you’ll be able to save your metric.
Now, you can select your landing page in the Dimension dropdown to have this Datablock only show the bounce rate for your landing page.
Click on the Goal Conversion Rate Datablock to open the settings panel. Then:
Now, your dashboard only shows goal completions specifically for your landing page goal.
By default, the Top Pages by Pageviews Datablock will show the number of pageviews each page of your site receives. If your site has lots of pages, you may need to adjust the number of rows that display in this Datablock to make sure you can see pageview data for all of the landing pages you want to compare.
To adjust the number of rows that display, click the Top Pages by Pageviews Datablock. Then, scroll down in the settings panel until you see Limit rows. Adjust this number to show 100, 300, 500 rows—however many you need.
Then, you can scroll up and down over that Datablock to view all of your pages sorted from most-to-least pageviews.
Now that you’ve created your first landing page dashboard, you can follow these steps to create dashboards for all of your landing pages to view real-time data and gather insights for how to adjust your marketing campaigns for improved performance.
Related Reading:
Originally published in September 2017, this post has been updated with up-to-date instructions and screenshots for how to find key landing page metrics in Google Analytics and how to create a dashboard showing those metrics in Databox.
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