Landing pages are a critical element of marketing automation, but do you know how to measure landing page success? Landing pages give you the chance to control the message your prospects receive when they click through on an email, social media post, or another conversion point. However, if your landing pages aren’t built to maximize ongoing conversions, then you’ll start to see performance dip across all of your marketing efforts.

Make the most of your content marketing strategy by understanding how to measure landing page performance. The following are the metrics you should be looking at:

1. Page Views

The most obvious thing when you consider how to measure landing page success is your number of page views. If people aren’t looking at your page, it isn’t going to help your marketing. When looking at your traffic, be sure to measure your total page views as well as your new page views, sometimes called unique visitors. Understanding the number of page views will give you a sense of which of your visitors are new traffic, as opposed to those who have returned to the landing page after visiting previously.

2. Bounce Rate

A bounce rate indicates the number of viewers who visit your page and leave without taking another action on the page. A high bounce rate might indicate that you need to consider your landing page user experience.

  • Is the action you want users to take clear and accessible?
  • Is the page laid out well? Is it loading quickly?
  • Are you writing content that guides users to conversion?

All of these are factors in your landing page’s performance. They all impact a user’s willingness to take action on your landing page and to continue to engage with your brand, product, or service.

3. Session Duration

Session duration is directly related to your bounce rate — it isn’t enough simply to see whether or not users are leaving your page; it’s important to understand how quickly they’re leaving. If your average session duration is only a few seconds, you likely aren’t doing enough to capture a user’s attention and present them with the information they’re looking for. If there’s a relatively long session duration, but your bounce rate is still high, you might have a confusing or frustrating user experience or simply too much content. So, session duration can be a measure of landing page success.

Keep in mind, landing pages aren’t intended to be your full website — they’re specific to a campaign or marketing message and intended to hook your audiences before giving them your full story. Resist the urge to flood the page with content, as this can lead to information overload.

4. Traffic Source

If you’re running campaigns on multiple channels and unique outlets that all point to the same landing page, you need to know where those leads are coming from. If most of your page traffic is coming from paid social media, you might consider upping your spend on those channels. If a lot of leads are reaching your landing page from email campaigns, you might plan to repeat the tactic in the future. With practice, you will begin to narrow down campaigns to the channels and outlets that work best for your business and understand how to measure landing page performance.

5. Conversion Rate

Last but not least, conversion rate tells you how many users actually take the action the landing page is driving them toward. After all, landing pages are intended to be conversion hubs — regardless of whether that conversion action is filling a form, downloading an asset, watching a video, scheduling an appointment, or making a direct purchase.

Define the action you want users to take on the page and use language that reinforces your call to action (CTA). Make it simple for users to take the desired action. If you want form fills, for example, make sure that the form is prominently placed and has relatively few fields to make it easy to complete.

Bringing Landing Page Performance Together

After you launch your landing pages, set goals for yourself and check in regularly. Once you know how to measure landing page performance, you will be able to tweak your landing pages to find what works for you. 

For shorter campaigns, weekly reporting might make sense, while longer campaigns might only need biweekly or monthly reporting. Give your campaign enough time to work — most digital tactics take anywhere from a week to a month to begin gaining traction, while bigger-picture goals might take months or years to see results.