Analysing Your Landing Page's Success [Part 1]

A successful PPC campaign must contain certain elements to bring in the much needed conversions. Some of these elements are as follows; to know how to create the perfect advert; have an optimized landing page; know the external factors that could affect your campaign; know the do’s and don’ts of PPC and know which PPC advertising network to go with. Out of the above, it could be considered that having an optimised landing page is one of the most important elements to a PPC campaign: it is what get’s you the sale or not, the click or not, the conversion or not. Already I have outlined the most commonly used types of landing pages advertisers use. However, it is one thing having a landing page. The next step is to analyse it to see if it is performing at its best.
The most use program on the internet to analyse the stats of web pages is Google Analytics. With the level of detail it gives to people too, it is clear it is also the best program to use.

What You Can Analyse Using Google Anayltics

Google offers so many stats you can use to analyse your landing page with. However, without knowing how important they are or what they even mean, they are completely useless. Here are the main stats you should be analysing your landing pages with:
Traffic
It is obvious that traffic is going to be an important stat to your landing page. Generally, the more traffic you have, the better although it depends on what your landing page’s conversion rate is like. As well as that, I have found that Google Analytics is not accurate in showing the total amount of traffic. Even so, it is still very usable.
 
Bounce Rate
This often gets confused alot with the Exit Rate. The bounce rate is the percentage of users that immediately leave your site after only being on one page. The exit rate is the percentage of users that left your site from that page and could have been on 1 or more pages on your site before. Because many landing pages for PPC adverts are single pages, the exit rate is not relevant. Yet, the bounce rate is. A high bounce rate suggest the people that clicked on your advert are somehow not satisfied with your advert/the content or at least something. This will give you an incentive to optimise it.
 
New Visits
‘Why is this relevant?’ you might be asking. Well, new visits (as it says in the title) measures the percentage of new people entering your site that have not previously been on it before. As an advertiser, you would expect your new visits to be extremely high (in the very late 90%s at least). If it isn’t, it suggests the same people are clicking on your advert and entering your landing page A.K.A. click fraud or invalid clicks. If you find your new visits to be low (anything under 90% could be considered low), contact your PPC network telling them of your findings.
 
Average Time on Site
Again, the average time people spend on your landing page is another useful stat for you to know. The idea is to have people on your landing page for the longest amount of time possible to increase the chances of a conversion happening. If you see that the average time is around 10 seconds for your landing page, you may need to consider revising it to keep people on it for longer (conversions do not happen in 10 seconds!). A good landing page for keeping people on it is an infomerical page. More info on informerical pages can be found here – Different Types Of Landing Pages.
 
Location of Visits
On AdWords, you have the possibility to geographically aim your adverts which overall could help to increase the performance of your adverts. This makes this a good way to see if your adverts are reaching the right people. If they are, great news. If not, you may again need to change your PPC campaign to make it hit the geographic areas of your choice.
 
There is so much you can use to analyse your landing page with on Google Analytics. For this reason, I’m making this article a two part article.   To read the second part of this article which goes over more stats you can use to analyse your landing page with from Google Analytics, click here: Analysing Your Landing Page’s Success [Part 2].