How Successful is Your Landing Page? The 3 Key Metrics You Need to Know

We’ve spent a lot of time exploring the copy and design techniques that drive successful landing pages. But do you know how to best measure your success?

That’s the focus of a most excellent article I read in Practical Ecommerce, Measuring Conversion Success: What are the key areas to watch when trying to keep visitors’ attention?

I’ve recapped the most essential points for your review.

1. Conversion Rate

We spend a lot of time talking about conversion rates. Let’s consider some of the benchmark numbers:

So what exactly is a conversation rate? It’s the percentage of visitors that turn into a lead, sale or some other desired outcome. A retail site is frequently considered a success when its purchase conversion is in the high single digits, but for lead generation sites, numbers in the high teens are considered good. An average retail site is converting about 1 to 2 percent of visitors and an average lead generation site is doing 5 to 6 percent.

Do the negative math. That’s a whopping number of folks NOT responding, NOT clicking, and NOT buying.

How can you calculate a purchase conversion rate? It’s simple. Using your site’s analytics package (see recommendations below), locate the number of unique visitors during a given period and divide that by the number of sales transactions during the same period. If you are 2 percent or less, the good news is that you have plenty of room to grow your business.

Increase your transactions by even one percentage point and wow, you’re making some real money. Consider this example:

Let’s say you have 10,000 unique visitors per month and you’re generating 100 sales transactions per month (1 percent) with an average sale of $90. Boost your site’s purchase conversion rate one percentage point and that translates to an extra $108,000 annually. Pop your conversion rate to 5 percent and you’ll realize a sales increase of $432,000 annually.

See why we spend so much time on this topic? :=)

2. Home Page Abandonment Rate

I’m including this part just for your reference, even if your particular interest is primarily landing pages attached to promotional email, site link and PPC campaigns. But let’s consider your landing page in the same light as a homepage. How many folks come to your landing page and bail? Like any transaction-page site or page, you have a short window of opportunity in which you can keep a visitor’s attention.

10 percent of visitors leave a site after the first click, but many of these visitors constitute either accidental traffic or are unqualified buyers. You probably wouldn’t have converted them anyway. An astounding 55 percent however, have dropped off after the second click, and 80 percent of the visitors have left after the third click. A well-constructed site with strategically placed calls-to-action can help address site abandonment issues.

3. Cost Per Sale

Here’s our last metric, cost per sale. Here you’ll divide your advertising costs by the amount of sales to calculate your the average cost per sale. What should your average number be? It probably doesn’t matter as much as just setting one. Ask yourself, “What is a customer worth to you, by single transaction as well his/her lifetime value (the number of sales, anticipated revenue) over time.” Then start working the numbers. When you can successfully manage the upfront cost-per-sale, you could easily realize big returns on the back end.

“Many business owners don’t know their cost per action or cost per lead. When talking about a customer’s lifetime value, you may take loss in front (to get the customer), but if you can keep him, he’s worth a lot. A pay-per-click keyword costing $8 may be expensive, but if you keep the customer it attracts, you get that back in spades.”

Next Step: Start running your numbers with a basic analytics package.

Here are some recommendations to get you started. (No excuses now. One of them is free.)

• From Conversion Rater: A Complete Guide To Web Analytics Solutions.


• ClickTracks – a favorite of small biz folks/ Good pricing, too.


• And from Google, a freebie: Website Optimizer (You’ll need a Google Adwords Account to use this tool. Sign-up is free.)

Copywriting Maven’s Landing Page Makeover Clinic News

Your response to my first makeover (SEOmoz) was outstanding, thank you! We have two (count ’em two) more candidates ready and willing to have their landing pages made over – live and in person – here on Copyblogger. They are:

• Brian Armstrong’s how to start your own biz site, Start Breaking Free


• Helen Graves promises to help entrepreneurs grow their biz at her smartly named site, HelenGraves.com

Thank you to both Brian and Helen for participating in the Maven Makeover and supporting Heifer International. I’ll be presenting these makeovers approximately every 2 to 3 weeks, so stay tuned.

From:http://www.copyblogger.com/landing-page-metrics/

How Successful is Your Landing Page? The 3 Key Metrics You Need to Know