Learning from Referrers and Landing Pages

In the past week, I’ve been able to gain personal experience and apply two very important metrics to my day-to-day role as a marketing manager.  They are referrers and landing pages. 

If you are new to the realm of web analytics, let’s look at each one:

Referrers

Ever wonder how your website visitors are finding you?  Page referrers are simply defined as websites or pages that send you visitors. They could be search engines (Google, Yahoo, or Bing), a link from a marketing partner’s website, a social media site or some random website that has linked to your site.  When reviewing your page referrer stats, remember that when you see a referrer you don’t recognize, it is likely that someone has linked to your site, and it’s worth checking out the page to ensure that the subject matter is somewhat relevant to your brand or at least not damaging to it.

 

One way of using this metric that some people may overlook is within your own site to determine pages that promote additional website interaction and clicks to other pages.  This metric allows the user to determine which pages are more successful leading to another page within a site.  For instance, on some retail websites this metric would tell you which specific product pages led to the checkout page during a specific period of time.  The product pages that have a low amount of page referrals just may be a good candidate for being a discounted sale product or may need to be removed as sale options completely.

As mentioned earlier, page referrers are a good way for marketers to drive traffic to their websites by forming alliances with other businesses.  For instance, in this example on the Safeway Foundation “Our Partners” page, nonprofit organizations like Easter Seals, the Special Olympics and the Muscular Dystrophy Association all benefit from being hyperlinked on the page.  In this case, the marketing team of these organizations is likely monitoring how many people are being driven to their website from the Safeway Foundation page.

Landing Pages

In his blog, Tradesmen Insights, John Sonnhalter describes landing pages as a tool that helps marketers target a particular audience using a unique page that allows visitors to download content relevant to them. Landing pages are also very instrumental in helping you track and monitor activity by offers so you know which offers work and which offers don’t.

From an advertising perspective, landing pages can also be used to help marketers track the performance of traditional multimedia campaigns.  For instance, each message would have a slightly different tracking URL for the specific media driving to a landing page, i.e. “www.duonebyars.com/radio” for radio and “www.duonebyars.com/OOH”” for out of home.  These landing pages would allow the user to determine which medium is driving the most traffic to their website.  This metric partnered with sales data can help identify the right mix of media to maximize the marketing budget and return on investment.

Final thoughts... “How could landing pages have helped?”

Back in the days when I was placing a ton of media for a Houston sports franchise promoting ticket sales, the ads were always driving to the team’s home page.  But as I look back, I can’t help but think that the conversions would have been higher if we had directed visitors from the ads to a landing page that was designed with the sale of tickets in mind.  The problem with sending the traffic to the home pages are typically overloaded with information like game headlines, information about the stadium, team schedules and player profiles.  If I could do it again, I’d have a landing page specifically established for the series of games that we were trying to sell.  Once someone hit the page, they could simply select the game they wanted and click “Buy Tickets Now.”

Give me your feedback and let me know, “how landing pages (or referrer metrics) could have helped” you with a past business decision.

Web analytics helps companies make sense… and dollars

Ultimately, marketers who are using the web as a channel for their business are in it to make money on a particular product, service or even ideas.  So it is important that they utilize the right tools to determine whether the digital efforts that they are investing in are contributing to the growth of the business and providing an adequate return on investment.  We’ve come to a time where more data is required to help us improve the performance of our sites, instead of simply measuring our success on the number of “hits” we get.  The tool for this job is web analytics.

In a short video, Jason Koeppe of Manta, eloquently describes how with web analytics, online marketers are able to track the success of how they stimulate consumer behavior on websites and maximize their performance by keeping a close eye on some key web metrics, including how visitors get to the site (page referrer), time spent on the site (visit duration), unique visitors, and bounce rates.

 

As we dive deeper into using web analytics to help us chart the course to a successful website that generates leads or sales, I suggest that any marketer embarking on this journey take a few moments to familiarize themselves with Avinash Kaushik's four attributes to great metrics: Uncomplex, Relevant, Timely and Instantly Useful.  When you apply these attributes to the metrics you are considering, you’ll be on the right track to establishing web analytics standards for your company and its growth goals.  Let’s look at each one.

Uncomplex: The metric needs to be simple and understandable when presented throughout various levels of an organization.  As Kaushik put it, “If you’re the only person who understands the metric…, then you have just guaranteed that your company will not take action.”

Relevant:  When considering metrics to monitor, we have to make sure that they are relevant to the goals and objectives of our business.  For instance, if we are operating a nonprofit website that is designed to provide information and encourage people to volunteer at a local facility, we would not need to concentrate on metrics like recency and conversion rates.  Metrics more relevant might include page referrer or bounce rates to help determine where visitors came from and if they stayed to interact with more than one page.

Timely:  Give your business leaders the time to react to web issues by providing data that can be acted on within a reasonable amount of time.  Kaushik notes that “between real time and three months, there is a sweet spot“ for delivering web metrics.  As marketers, it’s in our best interest to determine what that sweet spot is and ensure that the data that we get from our analytics can be acted on in time to better the performance of our web activities.

Instantly useful:  A good metric that is easy to understand and can be acted on immediately once it is delivered can be very beneficial when it comes to improving the performance of a website.  Just the other day, I was able to provide some information about referrer pages to our company leadership showing the number of visitors coming from a partner’s website.  The data helped us make an informed decision about a potential new marketing partner.  Another way to think about this is that if you present a metric that is not instantly useful, it is very likely that the data will be instantly ignored. 

Final thoughts... “How could web analytics have helped?”

With each blog post, I will try to look back on my career and briefly describe how the topic subject matter could have helped in a past business scenario.  Today, I look back at a time when I was in the restaurant industry.  One of the executives of a family friendly restaurant concept insisted that the website should include a “games section” that featured themed characters for kids to interact with.  Before the section was created, we could have used web analytics to determine just how long visitors were staying on our site (visit duration) and the types of pages that where being viewed most often.  We could have conducted a test by placing a link to a kid-friendly gaming site on our page to determine if there was any interest in that type of content. This could have helped us determine if a “games section” would be a worth-while addition that would increase the performance of the restaurant website with more kid interaction.

 

Give me your feedback and let me know, “how web analytics could have helped” you make sense of a past business decision.