Let’s talk about Landing Pages and Bounce Rates

Kyle James — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 15:59:58 +0000

So do you know what a landing page is? It’s amazing how many people that I talk to that don’t quite understand this subject. Landing pages are a very important element to actually marketing online. Landing pages allow you to segment your audience, track a specific segment, send individuals to relevant information and many other things. Although Wikipedia gives a little bit more of an advertising definition of a landing page, I would simply define it as:

A landing page is the first page that a visitor arrives on your site when they click a link or type in a URL to a browser.

When many people think of a landing page the most obvious one that comes to mind is your homepage and all in all this is your main landing page, but there are many other pages on your site that become the first page a visitor will see and many reasons for this being the first page that they see.

Reasons someone first lands on your site on a page other than your homepage

Search Engines – What’s important to look at in analytics is that if a certain search term is generating a lot of landing page hits or a certain page is generating a lot of landing page hits then this page should warrant additional attention to optimize. Keeping your audience and location of the site in mind maybe this page could be optimized with better call to action steps. If it’s an admission page are your schedule a visit and apply options apparent, do they stand out? Maybe it’s an alumni page so are there obvious links to ways to get them better connected? How about a news article that is generating a bunch of search engine traffic, well maybe a link to your quick facts page makes sense?
Direct Traffic – Direct traffic is the sort that is typed into a web browser directly. This sort of traffic usually comes from either a bookmark that an individual has or most likely they type in the URL to their browser. Most of the time this traffic is directed through non-web or traditional means. This sort of landing page is one that many people don’t really think about setting up but can potentially be THE MOST IMPORTANT to track. Yes it is possible to easily direct traditional traffic to a specific landing page on your site, and this is really worth its own post. Coming soon…
Referring Sites – Sites out on the web do link to deep content and it is possible that a first time visitor could see one of these pages as their first experience with your website. It’s worth revisiting this page to make sure that it is being effective. Maybe you even got a deep link on another site to a specific page on your site? What is the reason for this direct link to deep content? Is this page ready to convert those visitors properly?
Email Marketing – In this case you are driving traffic to a specific page deeper in your site. So why did you send them to that page? Are these campaigns creating sticky visits, lower bounce rate with more page views and longer time on site? Have you prepared these landing pages to properly handle these targeted visitors? Besides viewing this specific content what else do you want them to do?
RSS – This is something that you can look at to figure out if you’re RSS subscribers are clicking through to the articles or going anywhere else. Many people enjoy reading RSS through a reader, but not everyone. To my knowledge there isn’t an easy way to track this sort of traffic besides setting up your feeds through Feedburner. While I’m mentioning it you SHOULD have all your feeds setup through Feedburner anyway. It’s an additional step to track this data, but it can and should be done.

Bounce Rate finally becomes important

So now that we have looked at all the various means that individuals can directly link to your site what data should we be monitoring? Looking at bounce rate on landing pages provide a lot of insight as to where they go or if they simply leave your site. By definition a bounce occurs when someone visits a site and then leaves without visiting any other page. So if you are sending visitors to a page by any of the methods listed above and it has a bounce rate of 95% then that means that landing page traffic simply isn’t staying engaged or they are receiving what they came for and leaving.

Note: Bounce rate applies ONLY to page traffic is it is the first page that they visited, otherwise it becomes an exit rate. A bounce is always an exit, but an exit is not always a bounce because a visitor might have visited five other pages then left when they arrived at this final page qualifying as an exit.

Bounce rate tells you how effective you’re landing pages are at accomplishing their goals. If a visitor just landing on a page to read a news article that’s one thing, but if you directed them to this page to make a gift then we have a clearly defined goal that we are going after. Knowing how well this landing page is “converting” becomes quite valuable.

Final Tips

As I’ve mentioned you should be tracking your Landing Pages. If it’s a mail campaign then send them a short URL to a redirector that applies tracking parameters to the URL. If you are sending prospective students to a page that isn’t linked anywhere, but is the start of your funnel then why not go ahead and segment and tag them as a “prospective student”? Check out my post about Tagging and Tracking for tips about how to do this in Google Analytics.

Also on specific conversion pages remember you have a very clear and specific goal that you want this visitor to accomplish. Remember in the example above we wanted the visitor to make a gift. Because this is the point of this landing page keep the noise and options to a minimum, AKA have as few links as possible. If on this gifts page you have links to photo galleries, profiles, and upcoming events then you’re only increasing the chance that these “distractions” could cause your visitor to not convert. This is bad. Keep those links higher up on your site or if you really want these to visit these things then be sure to include them on the thank you page after they have given.

Want More? Some Additional Links

Here are a few great articles I pulled from my Delicious Account tagged Landing Pages.

Missed Opportunities for College Dorm Searches, Part 1

Kyle James — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 19:21:02 +0000

Over on FJ’s Higher Education Photography for Recruitment Blog he just made an excellent post about Missed Opportunity for Higher Ed. I wasn’t even half way through his short but valuable post before light bulbs started going off in my head. (Hey FJ thanks for the mention and hopefully this post will help fulfill some of this indepth SEO you claim I have) Picture to the right was take from FJ’s blog and if your college is interested in Higher Education Photography Wofford hasn’t used FJ, but I’ve heard nothing but great things from lots of credible sources.

So here’s FJ’s juicy tidbit:

A few weeks ago I wrote a post about Dorm Room Photos and since then the traffic to the blog has seen a steady increase in keyword activity surrounded by the search term “dorm” I have seen this in the past, as there are trickles of visitors throughout the year coming from “dorm” but nothing like the traffic during the summer, year over year..

College Dorm Searches To Drive Traffic

So what exactly do you do with that information? Well first off you need to know which keywords are bringing which traffic and how competitive ranking for each keyword will be. Luckily just this week on the Google Inside AdWords blog a game changing update was released, Keyword Tool updated with search volume data. I guess it’s not so much gamechanging because there are a lot of pay tools available that do this already, but more game changer because it’s official information from Google and because it’s free. When something is free it has a way of being more widely used by individuals. I’ve been thinking about this upgrade and how to explain it and FJ’s post gave me the perfect example. So doing a quick search on “college dorm” returns a chart that looks like the following. (Click on the picture to the right to view it full size)

Some related Searches for College Dorm

Note: You do not need to have an AdWords account to use the Keyword Tool, but it’s a little tricky to find. Here’s a link to the Adwords Keyword Tool.

College dorm returns over 60,000 monthly searches, HOLY COW! That’s actually a fairly valuable search term and the tool returns a whole list of other search terms that you can take a look at to gain a little better idea about the competitive environment and maybe something more specific to your school. Also at the bottom of the produced list is additional keywords to consider, who would have “thunk it” that dorm décor would result in over 40,000 searches per month?

Just as another note I typed in college dorm into Google and I didn’t see a search result on an edu site until page four. Congratulations Reed College!

I’ll let this knowledge sink in for a few days and I’d love to hear other people’s creative ideas about how to capitalize this knowledge before posting a follow-up post next week.