How to measure the success of your website landing page

We spend a lot of time exploring the copy and design techniques that drive successful websites and, more specifically, landing pages. But it's results you want. So how do we measure your success?

We measure landing page success in three ways. We look at conversion rate, abandonment rate and cost per sale/lead. We do this for every single web landing page we test and optimise.

Conversion rate

Conversion rate is the percentage of visitors that turn into a lead, sale or other positive outcome. You'd consider your retail web landing page a success if you managed to increase its conversion to around 9%. For lead generation landing pages, increasing conversion from 10% right up to 20% is excellent.

The reality? An average retail landing page converts about 1 - 2% of visitors and an average lead generation landing page converts just 5 - 6%.

Do the negative maths. That's up to 99% of people who are NOT responding, NOT clicking and NOT buying. Yikes - that's a lot of effort for what seems like nothing!

Homepage abandonment rate

As you are probably (painfully) aware, you have a pretty short window of opportunity with every visitor who lands on your web landing page.

- Around 10% of visitors leave after the first click - most are unqualified so wouldn't have converted anyway - An astonishing 55% drop off after the second click - 80% of these leave after the third click

You can see how a well-constructed website landing page decreases site abandonment and keeps those important visitors on your carefully constructed page. Even a small decrease in abandonment can push your conversion rates through the roof.

Cost per sale

Got a calculator handy? Divide your advertising costs by the total amount of sales/leads. This calculates your average cost per sale/lead for that particular website landing page.

What should your average number be? Ask yourself what a customer is worth to you by a single transaction on your web landing page. Then ask yourself what his or her lifetime value is.

When you successfully manage the upfront cost-per-sale, you can easily realise big returns on the back end.

So that's the three-pronged approach to great web landing pages. Even if you optimise one of these three metrics, your landing pages will become a much better source of revenue. For more profit, surely it's worth doing? I'm sure you'll find yourself addicted to optimising all your web landing pages in no time.


------

Tineke Bright is a professional copywriter and landing page expert with Silvester Wyatt-Nicolle (SWN). She is based in Guernsey (UK) and has written for a huge number of companies such as Vodafone, Waitrose and Natwest. SWN is a results-based direct response agency that has achieved spectacular results. Visit swn.gg to see some recent case studies.