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.