Understanding Landing Pages in Google Analytics
Understanding landing pages in Google Analytics is one of the best ways to know where to look when you’re gathering data that could improve your conversion rates. Designing an optimal landing page should not be based on what you think might work, or what others have suggested, but instead it should be based on data. When you use analytics to improve the conversion rate you are taking the emotions out of it, and then end result is a landing page that works best with the kind of traffic that you’re getting.
Best of all using Google Analytics is free, and now there is a horde of information about how to use it to the full potential. In this article you’ll learn about the type of information that Google Analytics can provide, and how to use it for improving the conversion rate for your landing page.
Where are your visitors coming from?
Let’s say that you receive 10,000 visors from the search engine and the majority of searches are based on one particular product or service that you have on offer. Then it makes sense to optimize the landing page based on that product or service in order to increase the conversion rate.
When setting up your ecommerce store or service you might think that there will be one product that attracts the majority of attention. However, in reality the market is responding to something else that you have on offer, and understanding what that is vital.
You can also create different landing pages based on where the website visitor is coming from. For example, if a website visitor is searching for your services from a particular city, then you can use geo-targeting to funnel them to a landing page that is themed around their location. Such targeting ensures that the most relevant offer is pushed in front of the potential lead, and that increases the conversion rate.
Split testing
You can run split testing with the help of Google Analytics. For example, if you want to run split testing for a sample size of 10,000 visitors, then you can keep an eye on the traffic levels of both versions. Once both versions of the landing page reaches 10,000 views you can review the results using Google Analytics.
Google has made it easy to interpret results, because a minimalist interface with supporting graphs is shown. Also the data can be manipulated so that you can view it in a format that makes the most sense for you. If you’re a marketer that likes to use spreadsheets, then you can export the data onto a spreadsheet of your choice for even more options to manipulate the data.
View navigation patterns
For landing pages that are integrated with the rest of your website and have many possible final locations where the user might end up Google Analytics does a good job of tracking the user. You can view the percentage of users that exit your website from a particular webpage. This might indicate that the webpage is a dead end that scares the potential lead for taking action. Perhaps the call to action on that page isn’t displayed clearly? You can investigate and make the changes to decrease the number of people exiting your website form that specific page.
Understanding the traffic flow in your website allows you to figure out how to setup the navigation so that you get the desired result. For instance, if you want users to use a click few navigation links on your landing page, but they aren’t doing that, then perhaps you need to increase the size of those links, or draw more attention to them.
Conclusion
There is no excuse not to use landing page Google Analytics because it is free and there is plenty of support for it in terms of educational material. There are of course plenty of other software solutions to help you understand the analytics surrounding your landing pages, but Google Analytics is an industry favorite among many marketers.
That’s because it is easy to get started with and the user interface has a minimalist design that doesn’t add to the difficulty of understanding the raw data. In fact it provides plenty of tools to help you segment the data so that you can get into the details without the hassle.
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Originally published at landingpageschool.com on April 19, 2018.
