5 landing page metrics you should be measuring in Google Analytics (and how to)

Oliver Meakings -

How do you know your landing page is working?

Gut instinct and the occasional conversion might be okay in Week One, but when scaling your marketing acquisition we need clear quantitive indicators. Here's 5 essential landing page metrics every founder should be measuring. Whether it's a SaaS, ecommerce or B2B landing page.

Google Analytics for landing pages

1. Time on site

Get a timer, get a friend, ask them to visit and read through your landing page and record how long it takes. This will be your benchmark for a new visitor to entirely read the page. Get another pair of eyes to visit and fly through the landing page, scanning the page, this will be your other indicator.This will give you two "time" indicators.

If your landing page is working, your visitors will be somewhere in-between those two benchmarked times.

2. Time on sections

If you have heavy content sections, you want to proceed the same as 1) and track how long a visitor stays on a specific section. It will help to figure out whether the section matters and whether to iterate on the content.

3. Scroll depth

You want people to scroll through what you consider being the "essential information" to understand your product and have enough insights to fill a form or start a free trial. If your scroll depth is too low, something is wrong. People get distracted or board and leave, or get lost and leave.

4. Bounce rate

Is your landing page Hero catching enough attention to create interest and push visitors to scroll downwards?  If not, start here.

5. Conversion

Whatever your main conversion goal is, this should be an indicator as well. If the landing page works, even with low traffic, it should convert. However if you have low volumes of traffic, a low conversion rate, and the wrong user acquisition strategy, it might be close to 0.

No conversions? Create a soft lead acquisition, like a "Get more information" link or download. This shows if visitors are interest in knowing more about your product or service.

You need to Segment

What is extremely important is to segment the traffic. Remove your friends and family, and marketing channels that are not your core niche/audience. You should measure the above with your key audience, ie: traffic from targeted Google Ads, traffic from targeted niche forums.

Summary

Review your key Activation Metrics vs Your Target Audience(s). The right % will depend on which product/service you're selling, whether it's B2B, B2C, subscription, or ecommerce.

The process of experimentation with your landing page

  • Build a landing page
  • Push paid targeted traffic (or organic targeted traffic if you don't have money)
  • Measure the above metrics
  • Iterate on the page
  • Repeat
  • Read the guide: how to build a high-converting SaaS landing page