27 Jan Understanding the Landing Pages Report in Google Analytics
We’re talking Google Analytics. And as you can see from these posts here on my blog, I absolutely love Google Analytics. It’s one of those things that we need to understand to get better results from. So today we’re going to have a look at the Landing Pages report.
I’m in my Analytics account at the moment. I’ve gone into Behavior, Site Content, and Landing Pages. Now, in this particular report, I want to get an idea of what is my top, in this case, top 10. Though I could expand that down for the 400-something pages there, but no need.
What are my top 10 landing pages? Why would I want to know the information? Well, it’s good to have a look here and see what pages people see first when they come into your website. The whole point of that, of course, is to look at the conversions, to look at how we can improve conversions. So, for example, I can see here, this is for my homepage that I’ve had 1,700 sessions people coming to look. Of which 79% of them are brand-spanking-new visitors.
Now, we like new visitors. New visitors are very important when it comes to growing out business over time. From them, I can see as an overall a bounce rate off that homepage. Not too bad. Not necessarily too good. I do tend to still get a lot of traffic from overseas, no longer my target market, from an industry that I worked in for over 10 years. And they still keep coming from countries that I don’t sell to anymore. But this could be improved by . . . I’m considering blocking certain countries, because they’d pretty well screw up my conversion ratios and stats. However, scrolling through, people looking at a couple of pages, spending a few minutes on the site.
More importantly, though, is this. This is average data across all the different goals I have on my website. Around 17% conversion, even with such a high bounce rate from my homepage. Interesting. Now, I’ve optimized my homepage to take people to the next step, what they’re looking for. We all do that for a homepage. What we often don’t do, though, is look at other opportunities, such as one of these ones here where I’m getting a lot of people. Still, it’s the very first page that they see.
And I’ve got some homework to do here today because if I open up this page, just here, it’s one of my blog posts. And it brings up an article I wrote just about security and so on for the Internet. What’s missing when I come down to the bottom here? What missing? There’s no next step. There’s no what to do next. All I do is just talk about some of the programs that I use for my computer, and so on. But there’s nothing. “How can I help?” “Contact me for more.”
There’s no upsell. There’s no call to action. There’s nothing. So I’m going to give that one some thought. And perhaps I’ll tie into one of my services where, you know, I fix up broken websites. I’ll have a look at the various products and services that I offer, and look to see if I can tie into one. I mean, I’m getting 500-plus people coming in here and having a look at this thing and just going, “Mm-hmm.”
That’s a lot of people. That’s 10% or so of my overall traffic. Of course, look at the bounce rate. Very high. They’re coming in. They’re looking at it. They’re leaving. Look at the gold conversions. Very low compared to the average because I have no conversion on that page.
So, basically, what I want you to learn from this quick video is to at least once a month, every three months, on the outside, schedule a couple of minutes to go to your landing pages report within the Site Content area and have a look at your top 10.
And have a look and see if there is some kind of call to action. What can you do to improve the conversion right to one of your goals on your site?
Now, one thing to keep in mind. This is landing page from all different places. There is another landing page area when it comes to the acquisition in the search engine optimization landing pages. This is because your account, your analytics has been linked with your webmaster tools account. And it is for SEO landing pages only. But from here, this one is for everything.
If I want to take a look and have a looksee what that source is, I can add in a secondary dimension acquisition source. That then gives me additional information, such as I can see my conversions now for those who went straight to the homepage. They typed it in. They were looking for. It was a direct inquiry. Down here, those that came to my homepage from Google. Those that came to my homepage from YouTube, I can look at these different things to see which areas are converting more.
And that’s important information to know. If I find that my conversions from YouTube are doing exceedingly well, then guess what? I’d want to spend more time on my YouTube. At the moment, around 8.2%. But look at this one coming from Google: 26%. Of course, I do put a lot of time into YouTube. But with SEO, I put more time into finding the right customer for Google.
Not just any customer. Any customer will screw up your numbers. We don’t want any kind of visitor. We want the right kind of visitor. Okay? This one here. Look at this. Interesting to my subscription page from a particular link that I put on my website. And I wanted to track how many people clicked that link-69% conversion rate. Right down there in the bottom corner. That’s what I like to see. What I would like to see, also though, is to improve those numbers.
So I can look at this and I can check out the data once every month, maybe every three. And make some big differences to the conversion rates on my website. Talk to you next time. Bye-bye.
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