Setting Your Landing Page KPIs (The Complete Checklist)

Let’s say you are launching a new landing page on your website as part of your overall SEO campaign. What key performance indicators (KPIs) for the page should be benchmarked before you begin the optimization work, and what should be tracked after the page’s been around for some time?

Depending on the type of your landing page, the set of KPIs one chooses to track is likely to vary from type to type. However, in this post I’d like to share a comprehensive checklist that I myself use to measure a landing page’s performance at different stages of its promo “campaign”.

*This list of KPIs is better suited for landing pages promoted via SEO as opposed to landing pages associated with one’s PPC campaign, email marketing campaign, etc.

I. The KPIs to measure before the launch

Before you try to beef up the page’s rankings, drive traffic to it and improve its conversions, you should benchmark its performance against a set of KPIs you can check already.  This will let you estimate the effectiveness of your future promotional efforts more accurately and will provide insight into the potential the landing page has.

Page is accessible

Once the page is launched, it is important to make sure it is available for crawling and indexing.

Things to check:

• HTTP status code is 200.
• The folder where the page is located is doindex/dofollow and is not restricted from indexing in the robots.txt file.

Page renders well across devices

Another thing to check is that the webpage renders well across the devices you want it to be displayed on.

Things to check:

• Page load time is under 20 sec. (you can use this Google’s tool  to see how quickly your page loads on desktop/mobile devices).
• The page renders well across devices (if applicable). You can use this app by OfferMobi to check what your site looks like on different devices – just remember to select the phone type).

Keywords are present in key page elements

Make sure your page contains the keywords it should rank for (this is a must if you’re planning to drive traffic to the page via organic search).

Things to check:

• There are keywords in page URL.
• There are keywords in title.
• There are keywords (or their synonyms) in meta description.
• There are keywords in heading.
•  There are keywords (or their synonyms) in first/last paragraph.

The number of keywords the page ranks for

Right after your page is indexed in the search engines, it probably already shows up in search for certain keywords, including your target search terms.

Things to check:

• The keywords your landing page already ranks for. You can check this using SEO tools like SEMRush.
• What positions the webpages shows up at for your target keywords. You can check this using SEO software like Rank Tracker.

II. The KPIs to measure after the launch

After your page is up and running and you are either building links to it, or experimenting with different layouts/calls to action, there are some more KPIs to measure.

The page’s social media popularity

Whether the page has social sharing buttons on it or it doesn’t, you can still check if it has gotten any mentions/backlinks across different social networks of the World Wide Web.

Things to check:

• The number of times the page has been shared on social networks, bookmarking sites, etc.
• The number of new social followers you got. Even though this cannot be measured accurately, you can still see if there was a spike in the number of people following your company on social networks right after the page went live. This is particularly important to check if you have a follow-to-unlock or a like-to-unlock page.
• Traffic via social (you can look this up in Google Analytics in Traffic Sources -> Social -> Landing pages).

Engagement scale

• The number of comments on the page (if the page allows for commenting).
• Whether the people who commented on the page are verified Google authors (if such people comment on your page with a link to their G+ profile, this might give the page a boost in the SERPs. I normally perform a search for author/[person name] on Google to see if the person has authored any other signed Web content).

Backlinks to the page

If your page is popular with the online community, people will probably link to it.

Things to check:

• The number of unique pages linking to the page.
• The number of unique domains linking to the page.
• The PageRank of pages linking to the page.
• The age of domains linking to the page.
• Whether the anchor texts used to link to your page contain your target keywords
• The number of outgoing links on each linking page.

Page rankings

After your webpage has gained some traction on the Web, you can check where it ranks for your target keywords compared to the rankings it had when it was just launched.

Things to check:

• Where the landing page ranks for your target keywords.
• How the rankings change overtime. This includes taking note of rankings changes over a certain period of time, paying special attention to dramatic decrease in rankings across a significant number of keywords.

* If you’re targeting markets situated in locations different than your own, it’s good to use SEO tools with advanced search settings (like the already-mentioned Rank Tracker), as such tools can emulate your target user’s context including location, language, etc.

Traffic to the page

Experienced SEOs know that high rankings do not always mean tons of visitors to the page. Hence, you need to track page visits separately.

Things to check:

• The number of unique visitors to the page (you can see this in Rank Tracker or in Google Analytics).
• The number of unique visitors that came via a particular keyword (this provides insight into what additional keywords you could optimize the landing page for).

Sometimes optimizers complain that, even though their webpage ranks very well in the SERPs, they don’t get much traffic. If this is the case, what one can do is (A) check how many people are looking for the keywords the webpage ranks for and (B) make sure the webpage’s title and description are appealing enough to encourage clicks.

Conversions

Things to check:

• Bounce rates for visitors that came via certain keywords or links.
• The amount of time the average visitor spends on the page.
• Goal conversion rates (you set and track macro conversion and micro conversion goals in Google Analytics).
• Goal funnel abandonment rates. This is the ratio of abandoned goal funnels to goal starts. You can see this statistic in Google Analytics in Goals -> Overview -> Goal Abandonment Rate.

This set of KPIs is particularly important to measure, as it would be indicative of whether the tweaks you make to the site (testing different copies, layouts, calls to action, etc.) improve its performance. By the way, when shaping your call to action, remember that recent research shows that nouns in calls to action work better than verbs ).

Revenue per visit

As applied to landing pages, your ultimate KPIs would probably be revenue per visit (RPV).  This is especially true of ecommerce pages where products with various price-tags are being offered. (Quick tip: when you place your most expensive items first, this helps increase your per-purchase value).

Things to check:

• Revenue per visit. Simply put, this is goal conversion rate multiplied by per-visit goal value. Susan Cabezas wrote a great post about this, by the way. She just uses slightly different terminology.

Summing it up, I’d like to answer one question that you perhaps have, which is – why so many KPIs? Why not just track traffic, conversions and RPV? Well, think of your webpage as a car. Sometimes your car won’t start, the wheels won’t roll or it would go too slowly. So, checking that all of its parts (in the case of the webpage – all of the conversion funnel parts) are working correctly is part of driving it to success.

And, in case you’d like to use this checklist, here it is presented in the form of a table:

Post image by Travis S. on Flickr