With a landing page created and a strategy for driving traffic to it deployed, you are now ready to receive visitors looking for what your landing page offers and convert them into leads for your business. But, how do you know if it’s working?
You can go with the wet-finger-in-the-wind approach and “feel” it’s working when you start getting more leads from your landing page – or you can use simple metrics to immediately monitor the results and make changes to improve them over time.
The funny thing about the statement above is that if you don’t measure and improve you’ll never “feel” all the leads that could come your way.
Traffic can be measured in a few ways, but the most accepted way is to install the free code that Google Analytics provides on every page of your site, including your landing page(s). This code allows Google to track every visitor to your website and provide you with reports that will tell you what is really going on.
Assuming you’ve added the landing page to your website and not put it on the site menu, every visitor to the page is one acquired by your strategy, since that is the only way to get to the page. So by counting the visits month-to-month you can see the effectiveness of your efforts to drive traffic to it.
The effectiveness of your strategy combined with your page content will be reflected in two metrics: the page’s bounce rate and the number of forms submitted, also known as conversions.
The bounce rate is calculated for you by Google and represents the percentage of visitors who leave your site without visiting another page. The landing page is basically the entry and the exit page, in this case. The lower the bounce rate, the better.
Conversions can be measured consistently by dividing the number of forms submitted by the number of unique visitors to the page over a given period of time. The result of this calculation is called the “conversion rate” and is expressed in percentages. A five to eight percent conversion rate is considered good for a lead generation landing page.
When you have an idea of the meaningful page metrics like visits, unique visits, bounce rate, and conversions you can develop a way to track them periodically. Once a month is typical, but whatever you do, make it regular.
What do you do with the data you are tracking? That’s the subject of my next post.