5 Actionable Insights to Extract From Your Landing Page Analytics

Pamela Vaughan
Pamela Vaughan

Updated:

Published:

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Your landing pages are critical to your effectiveness as an inbound marketer. After all, what better way to collect inbound leads than landing pages? So if you're not putting the effort into creating landing pages -- and the offers to house on those landing pages -- your inbound marketing efforts might not be faring as well as they could be. And where there are landing pages, there is data. Or at least, there should be. And you know how we feel about data ...

Analyzing how your landing pages are performing can provide you with some great insights about the strengths and weaknesses of your lead generation efforts. In short, studying your landing page analytics can make it easier to understand how well your pages are working and help you prioritize which pages and offers to test, improve, and optimize.

Interested in how your landing page analytics can help you make better marketing decisions? Read on to learn about five very powerful marketing insights you can gain from them.

The Metrics You Need for Success

For the purposes of this post, you'll need data from the following metrics to gather these insights:

  • Number of Landing Page Views
  • Ratio of Views to Form Submissions (AKA Conversion Rate)
  • Raw Number of Submissions
  • Number of New Leads From Those Submissions
  • Number of Customers

Where you find this data will depend on the particular analytics tool you're using. If you're a HubSpot customer, you can easily find them in HubSpot's revamped Landing Page Analytics tool, which aggregates the data from your landing pages all in once place.

1) The Overall Effectiveness of Your Landing Pages

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Are your pages generating little traffic? This means you're probably doing a poor job of promoting those pages through channels like social media, email, or your blog. To solve this problem, start promoting your pages! Create calls-to-action for your offers' landing pages, and use them -- within text, in buttons on your blog and other website pages, in social media updates, in email sends, etc.

Is your average conversion rate on the low side? On average, landing pages generate a 5-15% conversion rate. If your average landing page conversion rate is falling on the low end of the spectrum, you might be creating too much friction for visitors. There could be a number of factors causing this, so the only way to truly diagnose is to do some testing. Are your offers resonating with your audience? Use the information you have about the problems/needs/interests of your marketing personas to craft your offers. If your offers aren't compelling enough to entice landing page visitors to fill our your form to redeem the offer, you'll never boost your conversion rate. Are your landing page forms 50 fields long? Shortening lengthy forms will likely boost your conversion rate. Does your landing page copy sufficiently demonstrate the value of your offers? Read this guide to help you craft compelling landing page copy that gets visitors to convert.

2) What Landing Page Elements to Test and Optimize

In addition to -- and based on -- a more holistic understanding of our landing pages, your landing page analytics can also help you make decisions about how to test and optimize your subpar landing pages.

Take a look at your individual top converting pages compared to some landing page best practices and your worst converting pages. There are quite a few factors that can affect the performance of your landing pages, huh? Compare the page elements of your best pages to your worst ones to see if you can come up with any best practices specific to your business.

Do you notice that your top pages share certain similarities in terms of variables such as form length, layout, image selection, copy tone, messaging, etc.? Marketers should always be testing, so use these insights to form a baseline of variables by which to optimize and test on the underperforming pages on your site. This landing page A/B testing guide can help you get started.

3) How Your Landing Pages Are Converting Over Time

Understanding how individual landing pages are converting over time can help you pinpoint the offers that diminish in value. Knowing which landing pages are no longer performing for you can keep you on top of your landing page maintenance.

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Here are some reasons why landing pages might underperform over time and what you can do about them:

Your Offer Was Fleeting: Perhaps your offer was for a live event like a webinar, and the event has since passed. The experience for visitors reaching this landing page won't exactly be very conversion-friendly if visitors are encouraged to register for an 'upcoming' webinar that takes place in the past, will they? Perhaps you forgot to update the landing page with the recorded webinar and appropriate copy to reflect the change (or maybe you weren't planning to). If this is the case, update the page with the recorded video and see if its performance increases.

Your Offer Wasn't Evergreen: Underperforming landing pages could also be an indicator of content that wasn't evergreen (AKA long lasting). Some content just doesn't stand the test of time well, and even solid evergreen content needs updating from time to time. Things change, and your offers need to change with it. Update your outdated offers with fresh information and re-position it as such on your landing page to give conversions a boost.

Your Offer Is Getting Stale: Maybe you only have two or three offers and landing pages at your disposal, and you're promoting the heck out of them. Chances are, over time, the visibility of these same offers over and over again will get old, and your conversions will suffer. If this is the case, diversify your offers and add some new ones to the mix.

Whenever you update old offers, or remove or replace stale ones, just remember to replace any old, outdated CTAs on your website, blog, etc, too.

4) How Your Offers Compare

Did you know that the performance of your individual landing pages is a strong indicator for the performance of your individual marketing offers? It's true! Thus, understanding which landing pages are your top performers can help you identify which offers are your top performers. To get the most leverage out of this data, you should bucket your offers into two categories: types of offers and topic of those offers.

  • Types of Offers: When we say 'types' of marketing offers, we're referring to the format of the offer. Is it an ebook, whitepaper, webinar, trial, kit, consultation, video, etc.?
  • Offer Topics: When we say 'topic' of offers, we're specifically referring to the subject matter of those offers. For example, if you're a plumber, you might have a number of ebooks and webinars on different topics such as helpful plumbing tools, biggest plumbing mistakes, best products for unclogging drains, etc. You might even get a bit more granular and tailor topics to different personas.

When scouring your landing page analytics, categorize your pages by these two buckets, and then analyze. What patterns in views and conversion rates do you notice? Are certain topics getting less love than others? What about types of offers? Does your audience tend to prefer webinars or ebooks? Can you map preferences of type to specific topics?

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This analysis will indicate which topics and types of offers are/aren't really resonating with your audience. Use that insight to inform your future content creation efforts -- by creating more of the offers that work, and fewer that don't.

5) How Your Landing Pages Tie to the Bottom Line

Aaah, we tricked you! There's actually a third way to classify your landing pages, but it really deserved a section of its own. Because one of the most powerful insights you can gain from your landing page analytics is which ones are effective at generating leads and customers, you can use this information to also classify landing pages by stage in the sales cycle and also to inform your lead generation and lead nurturing efforts.

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By stage in the sales cycle, we're referring to a prospect's readiness to buy. Someone in the awareness stage, for example, would probably be more likely to convert on a more top-of-the-funnel landing page offer such as an educational ebook than someone in the purchase stage, who'd be more likely to prefer a bottom-of-the-funnel offer like a free trial or a coupon.

Conducting this analysis will allow you to identify which of your landing pages map to which part of the sales cycle, helping you to make informed decisions about which CTAs to use on different parts of your website (e.g. your blog vs. your homepage vs. your products page) or in different channels (e.g. social media vs. PPC vs. lead nurturing).

To conduct this analysis, look at the conversion rates of your landing pages from two separate views: which have been most effective at converting visitors into leads, and which have been most effective at converting leads into customers. From this, you can start to understand which offers you should be showing to visitors who are in the awareness stage for the best likelihood of lead generation, and which should be used in the evaluation and purchasing stages during lead nurturing for the best likelihood of customer generation.

For example, if you know your blog is one of the first places people learn about your business, you'd probably be better off displaying CTAs for those evaluation-stage offers on your blog. People visiting the products pages of your website, on the other hand, might indicate a later stage in the sales cycle -- either evaluation or purchase -- so it might make more sense to display offers catered to those stages there. We have a really detailed post about how to map content to each stage in the sales cycle here if you want to learn more.

What other insights can you gain by diving into your landing page analytics?

Image Credit: Kossy@FINEDAYS

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