You’ve designed killer landing pages for your B2B website, filled it with compelling copy and strong images that encourage action from your readers.
Now what?
It’s time to measure the effectiveness of your landing pages. Analyzing it gives you important insights into the strengths and weaknesses of your lead generation efforts. You’ll find out which pages are working and what’s working on them, so you can test, improve, and optimize them for the future.
The minimum metrics for landing page success
While there are many different metrics you can track and measure on any landing page, these are the basic data you should be following at a minimum:
- Number of landing page views
- Conversion rate of views to submissions
- Overall number of form completions (those are the visitors that accept your offer, whatever it is)
- Number of new leads from those form completions *
- Number of new customers the page generates
- Landing page bounce rate
- Cost per sale
* By completions, we’re talking about whatever it is you want visitors to do on the page, such as click a button, fill in a form, or download a report.
Basic insights to pump up your success
- Promote your landing pages at any and every opportunity, like hyperlinks in your email signature, a well-placed ad block on your business blog, and timely social media messages.
- Craft persuasive calls-to-action whenever you promote the page. You want visitors to click on the link and visit the landing page, so use compelling language in your CTAs.
- Shorten the forms visitors must fill out on the landing page. You may be causing them too much friction when they read the landing page, and the form takes too much time for them to fill out. A shorter form can increase your conversion rate significantly.
- Use engaging copy on the page to persuade and entice visitors to stay longer on the page. Does it sufficiently demonstrate the value of your offers? Could you find more value to give them? Include as much as you think it necessary to persuade them.
These insights are only going to help your landing page at a minimal level. If you really want to crank up your success to the next level, then you’ll want to adopt these trending metrics.
The new school metrics for landing page success
Sometimes the issues on a landing page are much more subtle. It can be hard to zero in on what exactly is giving you low numbers. Let’s take a look at a few more metrics you can track on your landing pages to diagnose those subtle issues.
- Dive deeper into your metrics and look at information like day and time of day metrics. Perhaps your landing page performs better in the mornings rather than the afternoon, and later in the week rather than at the start.
- Run A/B tests on your findings to see if you can further discover any new information. Test out different CTAs, wording in headlines, different images, and more. Compare your results and make any changes necessary.
- Use eye tracking/heat mapping software to find out where visitors are spending the most time. That software can help you with the positioning of key elements on your landing page and increase your conversions.
- Analyze your landing page from a design perspective and test if visitors are being put off by things like too much on-screen contrast between your graphical elements.
- Verify your offer. If you’re just looking at the metrics of your landing pages without context, then you won’t know the most obvious reason that a page isn’t working anymore: the offer.
- If it’s for a time-sensitive event like a webinar that happened recently, then naturally that page won’t convert anymore. Update the page with new information about the webinar, like its recording, and see if that helps.
- Some content just doesn’t stand up over the long-term, so you’ll need to refresh it from time to time to ensure it’s still valid for visitors. Consider re-positioning the page and updating the content with evergreen posts.
- Compare the offers on all of your landing pages and see how they do. Do the high performing ones share any particular traits/designs/content/copy? How about the low performing ones? This data can help you with your editorial calendar and guide your content creation efforts.
- Map your landing pages to your sales cycle and identify patterns. Based on where your visitors are in the sales cycle, they may be more or less receptive to your landing page. For example, a visitors coming through your business blog may be at an earlier stage in the sales cycle, so offering them a trial demo of your product may be premature. Match your landing pages to the appropriate stage of the sales cycle and you’ll notice a difference in your landing page metrics.
Tools for landing page metrics success
There are many tools out there to measure your landing page success. Some are built in to landing page technology, while others are individual tools you can use to measure particular metrics.
Basic metric measurement: Google Analytics – Free to use with anyone with a Google account, their analytics software provides a lot of the basic information B2B marketers can use on their landing pages.
URL tracking: Adding in a URL tracking service helps you analyze your entry points to your landing page. There are many free services out there, like the Google URL shortener and Bitly that offer both URL shortening as well as some basic analytics so you can track the number of clicks your particular links are getting. Combine these with your Google Analytics account and campaigns, and you’ve got a pretty potent analytics machine.
Heat map tracking: CrazyEgg is a heat mapping software service that shows you where people are clicking on your landing page.
Eye tracking: Attention Wizard is the tool for you to track eye movements on your landing page. Find out what visitors look at most/least and then make changes based on the metrics.
A/B testing: Optimizely, Performable, and Unbounce are some of the more popular tools out there to do split testing for your landing pages. They all offer easy-to-install services that track metrics like clicks, conversions, and more. Get started in a few clicks and generate reports on whatever you want to check on.
Take your landing pages to the next level with metrics
With a little set up and work you can use your metrics to optimize your landing pages more quickly. Find out what’s working and what’s not. Impress your boss with better numbers. Make the sales team happier with more qualified leads through better targeted inbound links to the landing page. You’ll notice your business starting to grow steadily.
Photo via launchbit
