Why You Need to Monitor All Your Landing Pages

Why Landing Pages Matter

Landing pages play an essential role in your digital advertising strategy. They serve as a conversion point for your paid media campaigns. That is why you need to be monitoring your landing pages, all of them, to ensure they are up to this critical job. Here is the what and why of monitoring your landing pages to ensure they are successfully turning prospects into leads and sales.

Landing Page Metrics to Monitor

Conversion is king. It is the entire point of having a landing page. A conversion occurs when a visitor takes the desired action on your landing page. Making a purchase, submitting a form, or clicking a link are all examples of conversions. That is why tracking your conversion rate tops the list of things you should be monitoring on a landing page. Additional landing page metrics to follow include: bounce rates, pageviews, time spent on page, and sessions by source. These metrics can reveal opportunities for improving a landing page and its conversion rate.

1. Conversion rate: A landing page’s conversion rate tells you the percentage of visitors to the page during a set period who completed the action you desired them to while on the page. You can calculate your conversion rate manually with the formula below. Alternatively, you can set goals in Google Analytics to automatically calculate and track your landing page conversion rates for you.

(total conversions / total visitors) x 100 = conversion rate

2. Bounce rate: A page’s bounce rate is the percentage of visitors to the page that exit without first visiting additional pages on the website. As such, landing page bounce rates can be deceiving. For example, if your landing page only contains a lead generation form, the page may produce lots of conversions and still register a high bounce rate. To avoid registering false bounces, you can create a thank you page that opens after a conversion. This will register in tracking as an additional page visit, preventing a false bounce. Using interaction event tracking in Google Analytics is also an option for improving bounce rate calculation accuracy.

3. Pageview: A pageview is defined by Google as, “an instance of a page being loaded (or reloaded) in a browser”. This metric can help you benchmark your landing pages against each other and the other pages of your website gain a quick overview of which landing pages are drawing the most interest. Especially useful information when running paid media campaigns.

4. Sessions by source: Identifying the sources of your landing page traffic is essential. This will help you assess and compare the effectiveness of your paid media against your other digital marketing initiatives and organic reach. Understanding your session by source statistics can help you be more strategic about where you invest your budget.

5. Time spent on page: Of the metrics to monitor for your landing pages, visitors’ average time on page should definitely come last on the list. For landing pages, this metric is usually fairly low. However, it can provide some useful information for optimizing underperforming landing pages. If you notice an uplift in this metric following cosmetic and content improvements to your landing page, it could be a sign you are on the right track for driving more conversions.

Now that you understand the metrics to monitor and why they are important, you will need to be sure you have an effective automated metric monitoring tool in place. Google Analytics is the global standard and provides a lot of free resources to help you set and customize your metric monitoring.

Landing Page Risks to Monitor

Chief among the landing page risks to look out for are missing pages, broken links, and malfunctioning forms. Though these landing page risks bear different names they can all be covered by the same term, downtime. Monitoring your landing pages can minimize the chances of downtime’s negative effects resulting in a bad user experience. This is particularly important when you consider the widely circulated statistic that 88% of online consumers report they will abandon a website forever, following a negative user experience.

1. Missing pages: Whether your landing page is just loading very slowly or is linking to crashed pages, as far as your visitors are concerned, you have missing pages. If a missing page crops up during the purchase process, your potential sale is lost. According to web and mobile optimization services company Yottaa, 57% of consumers have abandoned a slow e-commerce site to make their purchase from a competitor, and 23% never returned.

2. Broken links: Encountering broken links on your landing page can make your visitors’ first impression of your business a poor one. This can potentially prevent visitors from progressing to the next step in your conversion funnel and leave them less likely to trust your website, brand, and business.

3. Malfunctioning forms: Did you know that “More than 67% of site visitors will abandon your form forever if they encounter any complications [and] only 20% will follow up with the company in some way”, according to WPForms? With those statistics, it is clear you need to monitor your forms.

Monitoring all of these elements on your landing pages is also important to the health of your search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM) efforts. Site downtime affects google rankings, which can drive up the cost of your SEM efforts and undermine all of your SEO work.

How to Monitor All Your Landing Pages

Effectively monitoring the downtime risks for your landing page requires an automated solution. What you need is a landing page checker. For this type of targeted, marketing-centric monitoring, PageChecker is the clear choice.

PageChecker is downtime monitoring software designed by marketers, for marketers. With PageChecker, you can simultaneously monitor all your landing pages for downtime risks. Once in place, PageChecker will send alerts anytime a downtime issue is detected on your monitored landing pages. This will allow you to act swiftly, pausing PPC, EDM, and other digital campaigns while you resolve problems, and before customers encounter them.

To try PageChecker for seven days, commitment-free, click here and start your free trial today.

‍