Why Google Analytics is Key to Success For Your Landing Pages

I am still amazed at what a powerful tool Google Analytics is – and the fact that it’s available to online marketers for free.

Today I’d like to talk about how to leverage this amazing power for your landing pages, and how it’s important – no, critical – to your landing page success.

Google Analytics was first introduced in November of 2005 after Google acquired Urchin Software Corporation. They built the program on top of the Urchin on Demand service (if you've ever seen the initials UTM in any Google Analytics tracking code, that stands for Urchin Tracking Module).

Google Analytics has quickly become the most popular website and web traffic analytics tool, and is used by 55% of the top 10,000 websites.

And I repeat, it’s completely free.

How Google Analytics can Help You with Your Landing Pages

Source: Massey, Brian, Your Customer Creation Equation

Brian Massey, in his superb book “Your Customer Creation Equation,” says that in order to measure the success of the conversion action on your landing page, you must set up tripwires.

Tripwires help us measure when somebody has taken a conversion action on our landing page. A conversion action is typically when somebody fills out a form on our landing page, or when somebody goes through an ecommerce checkout process.

When somebody fills out a form or purchases a product, they are redirected to either a “thank you” page or a receipt page. This is your tripwire. Google Analytics can help you measure how many visitors to your landing page reaches one of these confirmation pages by setting your “thank you page” as a Google Analytics “Goal.”

As Massey states:

“Because analytics track every page that someone visits, you can look at how many times a Thank You page is visited. Google Analytics goes so far as to let you set goals on these tripwire pages, and will automatically calculate your conversion rate for you.”

Massey explains that by tracking visits to the “thank you” page, you can determine your conversion rate as well as your abandonment rate.

But what about multi-step forms?

Massey says that measuring the abandonment rate, which is the inverse of the conversion rate, helps you to measure the effectiveness of multi-step forms, such a during an ecommerce process.

But the good thing is, you don’t have to track conversions through multiple pages by yourself. Google Analytics can do the job for you. That’s where the feature called “Funnels” come in.

How to Set up Goals and Funnels in Google Analytics

Whether you want to set up a “thank you” or “receipt” page as your goal, or you’d like to set up a complete funnel to track how far your visitors get in your multi-step form, it’s not that hard to set up.

Step 1 In the Google Analytics dashboard for the landing page you’re tracking, navigate to the left hand sidebar menu towards the bottom under “Conversions.” You’ll see “Goals” and “Multi-Channel Funnels.”

Step 2 Click “Create a Goal” and follow the step-by-step process to set up the goal, making sure to use the URL of your “thank you” page. For more information, check out the Google Analytics tutorial on how to set up goals.

Step 3 To set up multi-channel funnels, click on the multi-channel funnel tab in Google Analytics. You must have goals set up before getting to this part.

Step 4 Start viewing your report!

Additional Points to Consider about Google Analytics

Some of these additional points I’m about to mention helps to drive home how powerful Google Analytics is.

1. Demographics

The Language and Location info can help you target your landing pages to the type of visitors you’re getting. Are you seeing an unexpected trend of visitors from Brazil? You might want to create a Portuguese language landing page.

2. Behavior

This can tell you whether your landing page is really engaging site visitors. Pay special attention to the new vs. returning stats. If your returning stats are low, maybe you need to tweak your landing page copy to make it more interesting.

3. Mobile

You’ll start to see numbers growing in this category, especially with the explosive growth of tablets and smartphones. If you’re seeing more than 20% of your visitors from mobile, you should seriously consider optimizing your landing page for that channel.

4. Traffic Sources

Finally, you need to look at where your visitors are coming from. This may not be necessary if you've created a landing page for a specific platform, such as Email or Pinterest. But if your landing page is a stand-alone landing page, your traffic sources can tell you whether you’re getting more direct traffic, referrals or if Google is sending you lots of search engine traffic.

Google Analytics provides you with a wealth of information – I recommend exploring all the nooks and crannies to see what nuggets of information you have access to.

How to Integrate Google Analytics with Lander

Let’s get practical. If you were to build your landing page with our own platform, integrating Google Analytics couldn't be easier.

Here are the steps:

After you sign in to your account, you’ll be directed to the Lander dashboard. If you haven’t created a landing page yet, go ahead and do that now. Go ahead, I’ll wait.

Finished? Good. Once inside the dashboard for your landing page, scroll to the bottom to a section called “Integrate Your Landing Page”. You’ll see an option in blue called “Analytics.”

When you click that option, a popup will appear where you can paste your Analytics tracking code. Paste the code, and click the two radio buttons that say “Automatically Track outbound links” and “Automatically Track Social Interactions.”

When you’re done, just click the blue “Update” button and you’re set! The option will turn green, which means everything is set up.

Your Next Steps

Whether you sign up for a Lander landing page or you have your own landing page, make sure to unpack Google Analytics and make sure you use it to:

Track conversions using your “thank you page”
Set up a conversion funnel
Check out all the other cool features that can help you optimize your landing page, such as demographics, behavior, mobile and traffic sources and
Test for yourself to see how easy it is to integrate Analytics into your own landing page by opening a free Lander account

See you there!