Google Analytics is an amazing tool that allows website owners to analyze their website traffic, which gives them great insights into the behavior of their website visitors.
Google Analytics is a gold-mine of data that allows business owners to make decisions that can fundamentally change the fate of their websites, and all of this is possible with just one small javascript code that’s embedded in the Header of the website.
In this blog, we will uncover the Landing page section of Google Analytics, and explore the different possibilities and learn to make meaningful decisions based on the data received.
What is a landing page?
Technically a landing page is a web-page that has been designed keeping the goal of Marketing in mind. Unlike web pages, which typically have multiple goals, Landing pages are designed with a single focus or goal, known as a call to action (CTA).
The ability of landing pages to communicate an unified idea is the reason that makes it stand out and is the best option to increase conversion rates, or lower cost of lead acquisitions.
There are 3 stages of a Buyer’s persona – Awareness, Consideration, and the Decision stage, and in this, it’s important that one considers this before they design their landing pages. A lot of times a badly designed landing page can be the root cause of low conversions or high costs.
It’s often recommended to hire expert web designers to create highly-converting landing pages.
Out of the multiple goals landing pages can have, here are a few of the most common goals of typical landing pages on the internet.
- Transactions/ Fund-raise – Selling a product or a service or raise money for a cause
- Sign-ups – Collecting email addresses/ other contact information – Surveys, Pre-product launches
- Awareness – Spread awareness about a brand or product
- Giveaways/ Contest – Invite people to participate in a competition, thereby encouraging them to engage with the brand
If we look at the following image, we can notice that there can be multiple channels that drive traffic towards a landing page, and for brands to identify the nature of their campaigns, they need crucial information that is provided by Google Analytics.
Understanding Google Analytics & Landing page Data
Let’s take a few examples to understand how we can better understand the importance of measuring traffic behavior using Google Analytics.
Let’s note that this is just one snapshot of the multiple data points Google Analytics provides. Website owners can create custom reports that can provide an in-depth understanding of what’s actually happening with their landing pages.
Pro-tip:
Integrate Google Tag Manager. This allows a business to set up custom events which give more insights into the landing page and paves room for improvement. One can measure things such as – “Scroll Depth”, “Number of clicks”, amongst other events through Google Tag Manager.
Here’s a snapshot of the “Landing Page Data” on Google Analytics:
The metrics in the column are:
Number of sessions – The number of times the landing page was viewed. In this, the 1st is the Home Page, and it’s been viewed 206 times in the given time-frame of data.
New Users – The number of sessions may be more than the number of people visiting the website. This metric tells us the number of unique new users on the landing page
Bounce Rate – High bounce rates are an indicator that people are leaving the landing page without any interaction. This isn’t a good indicator. However, extremely low bounce rates as in the above snapshot is an indicator that there is some anomaly in data-reporting.
Pages/Session – If a website visitor visits multiple pages, then that’s an indicator that they are interested in what the website has to offer.
Avg Session Duration – The more user time spends on your website the better it is. Low session durations are indicative of less interest, and a signal for the business to make the necessary changes
Conversions (Custom Goal) – There are a lot of custom goals that business owners can set-up in Google Analytics to track custom metrics. In the above cases, the website owner is measuring conversions in terms of the people visiting more than 2 pages.
Another use of this feature can be to measure the number of people who visit a certain webpage, say the “Cart Page”. Let’s take a few examples to understand how we can better understand the importance of measuring traffic behavior using Google Analytics.
Sample Scenario :
Suppose there are 100,000 people who have landed on your website, but only 10 purchases have been made. Now there can be multiple causes for this anomaly, let’s explore some of these causes:
| Indicators | Assumptions |
| High Bounce Rate | The website might be attracting Irrelevant traffic |
| Low Avg Visit Duration | If the average visit duration is low, this implies that the website visitor did not find what they were looking for |
| Low Avg number of page visits | If your website visitors aren’t visiting many pages, there can be 2 assumptions here:
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Based on what we have learned, what are the things that can be done to improve the metrics?
- Change the audience targeting of Digital Ads to drive better traffic to the landing page
- Make the landing page more interactive (Since the avg time spent is less)
- Improve the speed of the website (To reduce bounce rate)
This is just a sample of a very tiny use case, where we made multiple assumptions based on just one metric that we have received. Imagine the possibilities when we have 1000s of data-points before us, and we have to make sense out of that data?
Google Analytics is a free tool and a must-have for all website owners. There are multiple other tools for in-depth analytics such as MixPanel, KissMetrics, etc that many advanced users use.
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