Launching a new landing page is exciting. You spend weeks working and tweaking a landing page for public launch with hopes it will sell your product or service. After launch you are reviewing Google Analytics and CrazyEgg several times a day and keeping track of sales.
How do you gauge if a landing page is really working?
There are two web page analytic rates that you need to pay particular attention to, bounce rate and exit rate. The first thing we need to do is understand the difference between the two.
Bounce Rate is the percentage of visitors that land on a page and do not visit any other page on your site. This is a very telling sign. If you are using pay per click marketing or any other marketing tactic that will send visitors directly to your landing page and the bounce rate is high, that page is not working.
Exit Rate is the percentage of visits that leave the page based on the number of visits that page has experienced. The difference compared to bounce rate is, an exit rate visitor might have come to the page from another web page on your site then exited your web site.
The bounce rate and exit rate will tell you if the page you designed is selling your product. Pick a benchmark percentage to gauge if the landing page is working. I often use the bounce rate of my best performing landing page and add 15%-20%. That will let me know if I’m in the ballpark. If the bounce rate is 30% higher than my best landing page, then I made a large mistake somewhere.
Exit rate comes into play on the second (form) page after the landing. If you sell the product on the landing and take the information (payment, sign up) on the form page, look at the exit rate. If your landing page bounce rate is low but no one is buying, you might notice a high exit rate on the form page which means there is a problem.
Let the bounce rate and exit rate tell you which pages need work.
“If you are using pay per click marketing or any other marketing tactic that will send visitors directly to your landing page and the bounce rate is high, that page is not working.”
It’s also possible that your PPC isn’t working. If someone thinks they are coming to see one thing, and find something else, that would cause them to bounce… A note to keep your PPC ads clear and well-written.
Comment by Gabe — January 28, 2008 @ 3:43 pm
True. The article assumed the PPC aspect was in order. That was a big assumption on my part.
Comment by Tyler — January 28, 2008 @ 3:51 pm
I still don’t understand Bounce Rate. I have a Bounce Rate on pages nobody has landed on. How is that possible, since the only way to get to those pages is through other pages on the site?
Comment by Manhattan — September 8, 2009 @ 4:22 pm