Measuring how your website visitors behave is important. By understanding their behaviour, you can make critical and well-informed changes to how your website, campaigns and calls-to-action are structured, planned and executed. Within Google Analytics, you can use Landing Pages to optimise your first interactions with website visitors in a way that has proven most profitable based on previous user data.
Armed with user behaviour insights from Google Analytics, you can understand your website visitors’ behaviour and create user journeys that efficiently and effectively facilitate users getting to your most desired outcome – a purchase, a lead conversion and more. In this article, we will provide you with a crash course on what exactly a Google Analytics landing page is and how you can use it to improve your B2B website’s performance today.
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So what exactly is a landing page?
The term landing page can mean different things depending on who you ask.
A Google Ads expert will tell you it is the page where users land when they click an advertisement. A funnel builder will define it as the page where users submit their email addresses in exchange for a free product.
However, in the context of Google Analytics, a landing page is the page of your website that users first interact with — that is, where they “land”.
It can also be defined as the page where a user initiates a session on your website. A session is a time when a user is active on your website. It starts when a user first interacts with a tracked element on a web page, such as a button or the page itself.
The landing pages report in Google Analytics
In Google Analytics, you can view a report on the performance of your website’s landing pages. This report ranks landing page data based on various performance metrics, such as the number of sessions and revenue generated. There are two such reports:
- Behaviour (Site Content) Landing Pages: This provides information about how people engage with your site (e.g. sessions, % new sessions, etc.)
- Acquisition (Search Console) Landing Pages: This provides acquisition information about search results (e.g. impressions, search clicks, CTR, etc.) and is pulled from Google Search Console.
This article will focus on the first type of report, which, unlike the second one, carries data from all sources, not just organic search. For the purpose of demonstration, we shall use the Landing Pages report for the Google Merchandise Store, which can be found in the Google Analytics demo account.
By default, the Landing Pages report in Google Analytics is a table displaying 10 of your website’s most popular landing pages, ranked by the number of sessions. It then provides critical metrics pulled in from three other reports — Acquisition, behaviour, and Conversion. Let’s look at these in detail.
Category 1: Landing page acquisition metrics
The Acquisition metrics provide data about how users arrive on your website or mobile app. Those critical metrics include:
- Sessions: a session is when a user is actively engaged with your website, app, etc. This metric holds the total number of sessions initiated on that landing page within the specified date range.
- % New Sessions: An estimate of the percentage of first-time visits. This number tells you what percentage of sessions of a particular landing page were from users visiting the website for the first time.
- New Users: The number of first-time users during the selected date range. This is the value you get when you multiply (% New Sessions) by (Sessions).
Category 2: Landing page behaviour metrics
Behaviour metrics provide details on how users behave while using your website. Critical behaviour metrics include:
- Bounce Rate: The percentage of sessions where a user viewed a single page and left without performing any other action.
- Pages Per Session: This is the average number of pages viewed by a user after arriving on your website through that specific landing page.
- Average Session Duration: This is the average length of a user’s session when entering the website through that specific landing page.
Category 3: Landing page conversion metrics
Conversion metrics can either be viewed against set goals or eCommerce tracking or both — depending on what is most relevant to your business. eCommerce tracking focuses on transactions and revenue, whereas goal completion is judged based on selected goals, e.g. filling out a form.
You can then view their aggregate performance with goals by selecting “All Goals”. You can also view the individual page performance of each goal by selecting a specific goal from the dropdown menu.
- Goal Conversion Rate: For all users who came through a specific landing page, this is the percentage that performed an action you had set as a goal.
- Goal Completions: The total number of goal conversions achieved by users who arrived through that specific landing page.
- Goal Value is the total value produced by goal conversions for a particular landing page. This value is calculated by multiplying the number of goal conversions on the landing page by the value you assigned to each goal.
For eCommerce conversion metrics, Goal Conversion Rate is referred to as eCommerce Conversion Rate, which is the percentage of sessions from a specific landing page that resulted in an eCommerce transaction. Goal Completions are referred to as Transactions, the total number of completed purchases on your site. And Goal Value is referred to as Revenue, which is the total revenue from web eCommerce or in-app transactions.
Gaining insights from the landing page report
By combining segmentation, table searching, and table sorting, you can discover details about customer behaviour and then use this information to formulate highly-targeted marketing campaigns.
The landing page report can help you answer questions like:
Which pages are the most popular entry points to your website? And how do users act on these pages?
- How to do this: When the landing page report is sorted by the number of sessions from highest to lowest, you can find which pages are your website’s most popular entry point.
- What to look out for: You should check the bounce rate of these pages. Landing pages with high traffic but abnormally high bounce rates would indicate that the content on those pages is irrelevant to your users.
- What you should do next: A common cause of a high bounce rate is misleading links, where the content promised on a headline or a link is not what someone finds when they click through to the said page. To avoid a high bounce rate on your landing pages, make sure the content they contain reflects the links to it and is relevant to the point in the customer journey your visitors are in.
How is each landing page contributing to the achievement of your website goals?
- How to do this: If you target specific goals, you can sort the table by goal completion rate and then review the pages on a goal-specific basis or across all goals. If you have set up eCommerce goals, you can sort the table by revenue to see which landing pages contribute the most sales.
- What to look out for: You want to look at conversion rates and compare that with the total. For example, if you have a page driving a high percentage of your total conversions, but with a low conversion rate, it’s ideal for optimisation.
What you should do next: Optimising your conversion rate is an iterative process, but you can follow some good basic rules to simplify it. You need to ensure that the value proposition is clear, that it speaks to the right audience, and that the conversion process is easy.
How do different segments of your audience behave?
Segments are subsets of your website visitors that share specific characteristics. An example of a segment is ‘users who visited the blog page’. You can use already available segments, called system segments, or create custom segments.
- How to do this: By applying either system segments or custom segments to your landing page report, you can study the behaviour of a particular group within your audience.
- What to look out for: You want to look for patterns between segments and behaviours. For example, the segment ‘Made a Purchase’ includes only the website visitors that bought something. By analyzing the landing pages report for this segment, you can determine which pages you need to send traffic to if you want more sales.
- Next, you should use the patterns you identify to think about conversion rate optimisation strategies, remarketing, and the type of language you use on different pages.
Using advanced filters for deeper insights
Advanced filters allow you to analyse landing page metrics even further. One of the most powerful types of filters available is secondary dimensions. Secondary dimensions include the time of day, campaign, page, and device category. For example, you might want to use a secondary dimension such as Source/Medium. This dimension lets you know the channels users are coming into your landing pages.
The source indicates the origin of your traffic. Such as a search engine (for example, Google) or a domain (example.com), while Medium indicates the general category of the source, for example, organic search (organic) or cost-per-click paid search (CPC).
Once you identify the Source and Medium that are most valuable to your business, you can invest resources to maximize their output. For instance, if you find that email is the medium through which your landing pages produce 80% of goal conversions, it may be wise to focus most of your efforts on email marketing.
The combinations you can create with these filters are endless, and once you get the hang of things, you can use them to get critical data.
Collect, organize, analyze, repeat
The British physicist William Thomson Kelvin once said, “What is not defined cannot be measured. What is not measured, cannot be improved. What is not improved, is always degraded”. To successfully use Google Analytics in your marketing efforts, you must collect valuable data, create reports from that data, analyse the reports, and then use your analysis to develop creative strategies and solutions.
Do this often, and marketing will no longer be a hit-and-miss game for your company. If you want help mastering this or applying it to a B2B context, get in touch and discuss how Gripped can help you achieve your goals.
Landing Page in Google Analytics
To create a new landing page in GA, go to Admin | Traffic Sources | Landing Pages. Go to Settings | Create New Page and fill out all fields. The page name must be unique for each landing page you create.
The Landing Page Report shows detailed information about what happened after someone clicked through from a given page. This includes how long they stayed on the page, which pages they visited afterwards, and where they came from. For example, when someone clicks on a link from Facebook, you'll be able to see all the traffic sources, such as search engines, social networks, direct visits, etc., and then further drill down into each source by clicking "View All Referrals" or click "See Original Visitor."
A landing page is a web page designed to attract users who land from another site, usually through search engines. The goal of a landing page is to generate leads for sales. Landing pages are typically optimized for conversion rate and conversion funnel analysis. These pages can be used for lead generation, branding, traffic building, etc.
A page is any web page that has been indexed by Google. Landing pages are specific pages that lead users from one part of your site to another. The goal of a landing page is to convert visitors into leads, which means getting them to fill out forms or call you.
A Landing Page is any web page your visitor lands on after clicking a link from another website or after typing a URL into the browser’s address bar. The goal of a “landing page” is to convert visitors into leads and then turn them into customers. Your landing page should contain information about who you are, what you do, how much you charge for your service, and how to contact you. When someone clicks on a “call me now button” or fills out forms on a landing page, he/she becomes part of your lead generation machine!
A landing page in Google Analytics refers to any page where users arrive from another website. This could be a lead magnet, a product detail page, or a squeeze page. Landing pages help websites gain visitors and track conversions. The goal of a landing page is to convert someone who arrives at the site from an external source into a customer.
From there, you can view all your landing page data. Also, if you have multiple sites in one account, you must select "Site Content" instead of "Page Content".
The four main reports in Google Analytics include Acquisition, Behavior Flow, Referrers, and Site Content. These reports provide detailed information about how visitors arrive at your site and what they do while visiting your website.