Use Google Analytics To Find Your Most Valuable Landing Pages
PPC account managers regularly tear their hair out trying to find landing pages that convert. I’ve been there and it can be really tough to get those conversions and Google Analytics can help!
You’ve done everything you can think of to optimize the paid search campaigns for relevant, high-quality traffic, your account structure is pristine, your keyword inventory has exhausted all terms closest to the conversion, your ad copy is spicy and definitely catching eyeballs, but those clicks just aren’t converting as well as you expected.
What’s the problem? Well…are you sending that traffic to your most valuable landing pages? Do you know which pages are the most valuable? Have you built campaigns around those high-value pages?
When it comes to traffic, especially the paid variety, you want to get that ROI as high as possible. I know I do, as a consultant I spend other people’s money and it’s important that I see a return on that investment or I haven’t done my job.
This is where I need to dip into my toolbox and look at what’s happening on the site because no matter how much money I put into my ads, if the pages aren’t sealing the deal I will get nowhere.
How I Find Those Valuable Landing Pages
If you’ve been following me for any length of time you know I drank the “gool-aid” years ago, so my go-to tool for this time of insight is definitely Google Analytics.
Google Analytics, or any good post-click analytics tool is aggregating this information for you along with a ton of valuable information. All you have to do is look!
Ecommerce tracking has been installed. The metric you’re looking for is Page Value and you can find it in your content reports. Google Analytics automatically logs this metric for you under two circumstances:
- Ecommerce tracking has been installed.
- Your goals have been given values.
If neither of these conditions are met, you will not see any data reported under this metric. I’ll address additional metrics to look at if that is the case in another post.
Once there is a value to track in Google Analytics, you’ll start to see page values.
I like to take a look at All Pages, this way I’ll be able to dig up the most valuable pages on the site regardless of the type of traffic going to these pages. You’d be surprised how many times I find a random page that is not being used as a landing page that converts like crazy.
Once selected, All Pages should land you on the Explorer tab by default where you’ll see the Page Value column at the end of the score card.
Google describes Page Value as follows:
The average value of this page or set of pages. Page Value is ((Transaction Revenue + Total Goal Value) divided by Unique Pageviews for the page or set of pages)).
Google is essentially handing you the pages with the highest transactional or goal value, as it related to page views…bam! For you old school analysts this metric used to be $ Index.
Now all you have to do is sort the pages by Page Value to uncover the most valuable pages. You may find pages that you never thought to focus on. You may uncover some pages that you thought were winners that maybe need some work. You’ll probably find some pages that are worth testing against each other.
All in all, Page Value is a very insightful metric when optimizing your website and your traffic acquisition strategies. I highly recommend keeping an eye on this metric when performing landing page tests, it’s good stuff!
