Once you’ve optimized landing pages, message-matched them with your ads, and set up your conversion funnel, the exciting part starts: watching traffic roll in and seeing advertising conversions. And if you want this process to work like clockwork, you need to regularly audit your landing pages.
Without understanding how your page is doing, you won’t be able to optimize landing pages for best results, so learning how to audit your pages properly is a critical component of your strategy.
Let’s look at how you should audit your landing page performance and what metrics you need to consider.
How to calculate landing page conversion rate
The main goal of landing pages is to convert your target audience into customers, so it makes sense that conversion rates will be a key metric to track when you are auditing your page.
So, what is conversion rate?
A conversion rate represents the percentage of visitors to landing pages who complete a desired action, such as filling out a form, making a purchase, requesting a demo, clicking a call-to-action button, and so on.
To calculate your landing page conversion rate, you would use the following formula:
Conversion Rate (CVR) = (Total Conversions ÷ Total Visitors) x 100
For example, if 10,000 visitors came to your landing page and 500 of them completed and submitted a form, then your CVR would be 5%.
And this might prompt you to think, “Is that a good conversion rate? What should my conversion rate be?” The answer to that is not quite black and white.
First and foremost, any improvement in CVR is a win. If you started with a 2% CVR and landing page optimization led to a 5% CVR, then that’s a great example of a successful CVR.
However, you may need to figure out how you stack up against the competition.
Recent data shows that Google Ads see an average conversion rate of 4.45%, while Facebook Ads see a conversion rate of 7.44% on average across 11 industries.
How to measure landing page success: 6 additional landing page metrics to track
When auditing the performance of your landing pages, conversion rates are a key metric, but there are several other metrics that you should consider while you’re auditing. Below are six landing page metrics that are important to track.
1. Bounce rate
Marketers who track website visits are familiar with bounce rates, which refers to the percentage of your target audience who leave your website without taking action. When website visitors leave (bounce from) your site, they don’t convert, so keeping them on your page can help increase your conversion rate.
You are likely using your landing page for a specific conversion goal, so you’ll want to optimize your page to ensure that fewer people are bouncing and more people are taking the desired action.
Typically, bounce rate is calculated by analyzing the number of sessions involving only one of your pages. That formula looks like this:
Bounce rate = (Total number of single-session visits ÷ Total number of website visits) x 100
To get more specific about your landing page, you can divide the total number of non-converting sessions (sessions that do not lead to a second page) by the total number of landing page visits.
Landing page bounce rate = (Total number of non-converting sessions ÷ Total number of landing page visits) x 100
So, if 10,000 people visit your landing page and 9,000 of them leave your page without taking any action, your bounce rate will be 90%.
According to recent data, landing pages see an average bounce rate of 70-90%.
2. Pageviews
The pageviews metric measures how many pages are viewed and/or loaded in a session and includes repeated views of a page. Marketers analyze this metric in any audit, but it is best used alongside other metrics that paint a larger picture of your landing page’s story.
The reason pageviews shouldn’t be a standalone metric is because anytime a user lands on a page and refreshes that page, each instance is counted as a pageview.
Many marketers use tools like Google Analytics to easily and quickly track pageviews. When analyzing this metric for your landing page, it’s helpful to also track the number of unique visitors so you can understand how many of your pageviews are credited to new traffic.
3. Sessions by source
Most marketing campaigns involve several touchpoints – you may be running paid social media ads, YouTube videos, display ads, a blog post, and email marketing that all point back to your landing page.
Understanding the source of your leads goes a long way in improving landing page performance. For example, suppose you know that most of your leads are coming by way of social media ads but almost none are coming as a result of your emails. In that case, you can optimize by increasing social media ad spend and pumping the breaks on future emails.
Track sessions by source to get these insights. This tells you where your landing page traffic is coming from and can easily be found in Google Analytics.
Knowing what is and isn’t working is critical in increasing landing page conversions.
4. Cost per conversion
Generating leads is only part of the story when it comes to landing page best practices and conversion rate optimization. It is also important to understand how much each conversion is costing you.
Cost Per Conversion (CPC) measures how much it costs to convert a lead into a customer. To measure this, you take the total cost of your marketing campaign and the total number of conversions resulting from that campaign. The formula looks like this:
Cost Per Conversion (CPC) = Total cost of marketing campaign ÷ Total number of conversions
For example, if your marketing campaign for your landing page cost you $5,000 and you were able to convert 500 new customers, then your CPC is $10.
You want to keep an eye on your CPC because if it is getting too expensive to convert a customer, then you will need to adjust your strategies. Likewise, if your CPC goes up over time, then you’ll want to figure out how to lower the cost back down.
5. Form abandonment
Your landing page elements likely include a form that ideally will be completed by visitors. If you want to know if your landing page form is doing its job of collecting lead information, then form abandonment is an important metric to keep an eye on.
Form abandonment refers to a user interacting with a form – they clicked on it, or filled it out – but did not complete the form all the way. As the name implies, this metric tracks people who abandoned your form.
Note that this is not the same as bounce rate, where visitors leave your landing page without completing an action. In this case, visitors have begun to complete the form but have not finished it.
If your form abandonment rate is high, it’s important to look into why.
Do you have slow loading pages? Do you have longer landing pages that require a lot of scrolling? Do you have unnecessary elements that are getting in the way of form completion? Are your landing page message and call-to-action clear and obvious? Do you ask too much in your form or don’t link to your privacy policy to assure visitors that their information is safe?
Understanding user behavior is crucial, and too many form drop-offs may indicate that your landing page form needs optimization.
6. Return vs. New visitors
To further understand user behavior and build good landing page optimization practices, looking at your number of return visitors versus new visitors is a good idea.
Returning visitors are users who have been to your website before, while new visitors are those who are landing on your site for the first time.
If you have a high volume of visitors returning to your landing page, that’s not necessarily bad. Something captivated their attention and caused them to return, but why didn’t they convert the first time?
What is the landing page experience like for them? Digging into these insights can help you adjust your messaging, your page load speed, and how you convey your value proposition so that you might achieve conversions more quickly and more often.
When looking at your new visitors, if the number of new visitors per week is low or declining, you will need to look at your entire marketing campaign.
- What is performing, and what needs to be improved?
- How can you get more potential customers over to your landing page?
- Is your landing page search engine optimized?
- Have you considered mobile optimization?
- Do you need to dial up or dial down any ad spend?
Understanding who is visiting and who is not visiting your landing page can help you optimize your landing page elements and bring the right ratio of return visitors to new visitors.
How to use GA4’s Performance Max Campaign to analyze your landing page
Using the right tools to understand your customer journey can go a long way in delivering the insights you need to optimize your landing pages.
Many marketers choose to use Google Analytics because it is user-friendly and covers a lot of ground. Google Analytics 4 (GA4) gives marketers more access to in-depth reports and analysis capabilities, including user engagement metrics such as time spent on the page, bounce rate, conversion rate, and more.
Performance Max is a campaign type in GA4. It is a goal-based campaign that allows marketers to access all of their Google Ads inventory in one single campaign. It is designed to deliver more conversions across Google’s channels, such as YouTube, Display, Search, and more.
Performance Max uses Google AI to help you meet your specific ad goals. For example, if you have a specific CPC goal, Google AI will bid and optimize your budget, audience, creatives, attribution, and more to help you achieve your goal.
A Performance Max campaign may be a great choice if you want to find more conversions and get deep insights as you perform your landing page audit.
To set up and get the most out of a Performance Max campaign, you will need to use conversion tracking and up-to-date remarketing lists.
In GA4, Performance Max campaigns can be tied to sales, leads, traffic, and store visit objectives. You can also create a campaign without a goal’s guidance.
One of the more commonly used Performance Max campaigns is to drive online sales or generate leads, which likely aligns with the goals of your landing page.
GA4 allows you to set the parameters of your campaign, including your bidding preferences, bidding strategy, target location, campaign language, and more. GA4 will even automatically generate creative assets for your campaign.
If you are using a Performance Max campaign for your landing page, you will benefit from creating custom reports that focus on landing page performance. These reports will be critical in auditing and optimizing your landing page for best results.
Because Performance Max is simply a type of campaign within GA4, you will follow the same process for accessing your custom reports as you do with other Google Analytics campaign types.
Access reports by signing in to Google Analytics, clicking Campaigns, and then Insights & reports.
Learn more about Performance Max campaigns by watching Google’s video:
How to analyze landing page data and reports in the Instapage dashboard
Instapage is a powerful landing page platform designed to maximize your advertising conversions. When using Instapage, marketers have access to landing page data such as traffic, traffic source, conversion rates, and more.
The landing page platform also allows you to run heat maps on your landing page to understand where your landing page’s most valuable real estate is and how visitors interact with it.
Watch this video to learn how understanding your heat maps can help you increase landing page conversions:
Take it one step further by A/B testing your pages to see which messages, designs, form placements, and more work best.
The insights gained from Instapage’s visual data reports can be immensely valuable when auditing your landing page and making adjustments to maximize performance.
To access the analytics dashboard from your dashboard’s Landing Pages tab, click on the three dots and select ‘Analytics’.
Here, you can see performance metrics for desktop and mobile users. You can also apply filters, see results for a custom date range, and connect your Google Ads account.
A performance graph gives you a snapshot of your visitors, conversions, and bounce rate over a given period of time, so you can quickly analyze whether your landing page is on the right track. You can even download your report in .txt, .csv, or .xlsx format.
If you’re using Google Analytics and want advanced metrics, you can customize and add scripts to your landing page using Instapage.
You can also use custom codes to track conversions triggered by button clicks, form submissions, and thank you page clicks, and attribute conversions to A/B test variations. Learn more about custom codes here.
Improving landing page performance
Page speed, landing page design, landing page content, and messaging are all important for a successful landing page. However, knowing how to properly audit your landing page and use the right metrics to dig into performance can help you optimize conversions and get the best results from your campaign.
Instapage not only helps you build beautiful, powerful landing pages but also gives you the tools to analyze your pages’ performance and experiment with ways to improve them.
Working as a marketer in the current climate requires being agile, adaptable, and analytical. Instapage makes it easy for you to succeed in marketing and create landing pages that bring real results to your business. Get started with a 14-day free trial and watch the conversions roll in.
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