The 10-Minute Guide to Landing Page Analysis (and the recommendations that follow)

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First impressions are important. To ensure you're making a good one, you should review where most visitors enter and what they first see. In web analytics, this is called landing page analysis. This post is going to help you to do your own 10-minute analysis of your landing pages, identify what's working, what isn't, and what you can do to improve.


Minute 0-2 - The 30k Feet Stage: View the weekly dashboard you have set up and automated so you get a feel for how the website is doing. If you haven't set up the dashboard, check my post on how to create an effective dashboard in regards to the key modules you require, then use this guide to build. Don't worry, it's not a show-stopper if you don't have a dashboard. Simply go to Acquisition-All Traffic-Channels within the Google Analytics interface and see which source is doing the best. In my example, I see that most of my traffic is coming from organic search. For those that do not know, organic search is typing in a query into a search engine, such as Google, and receiving a set of results to click-through.
Minute 2-4 - The Discovery Stage: Go to All Traffic Channels Report and then click into "Organic Search" in the results. This will give you a set of keywords that were used to get to your site. Within this report, however, is a link to the landing pages specific to Organic Search.

 Once you have clicked into that, you will get to the landing pages that were accessed as a direct result of an organic search.

 Minute 4-5 - The Page Performance Stage: Now that we can see the top landing pages, focus on the top 5-10 pages that have the highest sessions, then reference their conversions. This will tell you pretty quickly which specific page was responsible for those sessions that get the main share of form fills. 


 A few things should strike you from this data:

  1. The 3rd and 4th listing show the highest conversion rates
  2. The 1st and 2nd listings have many more sessions, but not nearly as good of conversion rates

We need to figure out what search engines, specifically, this traffic came from. To do this, we need to use the secondary dimension selection and add "Source" to the report. 

 Minute 5-7 - The Search Engine Review Stage: Now we know that all of our top organic search traffic comes from Google (pretty typical). Even if traffic came from other search engines, we have a sense of the search engines most people tend to use to come to our site. The next step is to learn a bit more about those people in order to best market to them.

Minute 7-10 - The User Analysis Stage: You know that Google is your site's best source for traffic, but don't rush to judgment on your marketing strategy. You need more data to decide what platform to use to best market to your users. The following two steps at this stage are key in knowing what to recommend and why.

 Step 1 - Are your users new or returning? Adding the "User Type" as the secondary dimension will be able to help you isolate the pages and see if users are new to the site, or if they are returning to the site:


Step 2 - Are our users mobile or desktop users? From the data, we can see that most of your visitors are new. Now you need to ensure you know how they view your site. In other words, are they mobile or desktop visitors? Using the "Mobile (Including tablet)" dimension, you can see if you swing more to mobile or desktop:

At last, you know that you lean more to the desktop, that your users are mainly new users, and that your top traffic all use Google as their search engine. The analysis is complete and you can move to recommendations.

 Recommendations
The meat of the analysis is how you go towards action. If I were the analyst using this data, I would recommend utilizing Google AdWords for a paid search campaign to try and earn business from the new user group. I would also ensure that the targeting of that campaign is directed to both mobile and desktop users but slightly higher to the desktop. Finally, to close the loop, because there are a few pages with less than the desired conversion, I would recommend ensuring SEO best practices are being used utilizing Google Search Console and the Moz 2018 Checklist (they rock) as your guides.

 Conclusion
Landing page analysis is your gateway to understanding how your users initially engage with your website. Utilizing a few simple dimensions you can better isolate what is working, what isn't, and then isolate actions to take from that data - in 10 minutes (or less)!
Location: Omaha, NE, USA

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