I love looking at landing pages, especially segmenting the report by conversion. When visiting a site, we all land on a page via search engines, external sites, email, banner ads, bookmark, facebook, etc. Regardless of where site traffic come from, if the landing page is an optimal page that speaks to people's needs, eventually people may convert on that site.
A conversion could be anything, it could be an instant that defines the moment of success.
Here are some examples:
- Orders
- Subscribed for blog feed
- Email subscription
- Clicked on twitter, linkedin, about us link
- Generated product review/testimonial
- Shared content (advocated)
- Clicked on on-site ads
- Acquired a lead
When you segment your data based on a specific conversion, you will find various segmented data sets yielding different results in KPIs. Assessing landing pages based on conversions are great because it allows you to focus on the first page that convinced your site visitor to complete a desired action/outcome.
Looking at this example chart, you can definitely see the head and the tail, which is based on the cut off you define. Let's say 50% of the revenue was contributed by top 5 pages. Given that there are total of 35 landing pages that contributed to conversions, it is insightful to know that these 5 pages helped you generating 50% of your revenue!!
Biggest question is, what strategy are you going to introduce to optimize the other 30 pages? Even if you improve (theoretically) all of these 30 pages to convert better, the likely hood for you to see this curve from head to tail will always exist. However, it is very important to continue and set goals > measure > report > analyze > optimize > set goals (repeat).
What you need to look at when you optimize the long tail pages are:
- How much did your optimization plan and action supported improving the number of orders in the tail segment, and revenue growth from these long tail landing pages.
- Engagement and visitor type difference in head vs. tail. How did your optimization impacted these visitors.
- Bounce rate improvements based on your optimization to these critical and key pages.
You may ask, what about the pages that aren't showing up here in the landing page's long tail chart? If those pages are so important that you think it should contribute to your site's success, then it is a clear indication that the page is very ineffective, and it is a call-to-action to do something about it.
It is imperative to take these number of entry pages (segmented by orders) and divide it by overall number of entry pages served. For example, if you had 100 pages on your site and 90 of them were your entry pages, then we can say 39% (35/90) of the entry pages are contributing to conversion or your desirable outcome. This is a good metrics to see the allocation of effective entry pages that are supporting your site's goal. A great bench mark to gauge after executing your optimization strategy.
The most important thing is to see how your campaign and optimization strategy impacted the landing pages, and I am sure you'll see some difference in this data matrix.
Good luck analyzing your landing pages, and I'd love to hear your thoughts. If not on my blog, maybe through Twitter.
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