An analysis of entry or landing pages can be particularly insightful if analyzed appropriately. Simply looking at your top entry pages can help show you the pages you can focus on that will have the greatest immediate impact on the overall site performance. Unless you look deeper into the data, however, and combine other metrics in your analysis you will not be gaining the insights necessary to make well informed changes to your site.

So what other metrics should you use in your analysis of your entry pages? A few metrics that will allow you to begin to delve deeper are:

Average Time Spent on the Page: This allows you to assess which pages are the most successful at drawing a visitor in and beginning to spark their interest in finding out more about your products or services.

Percentage who Click Through to another Page: This gives insight into how useful the entry page is at getting visitors deeper into the site and hopefully beginning down the conversion path.

These are just the basics and will only allow you to see which pages have the greatest impact at delivering initial visitor engagement. To see the full picture you must look back at where the traffic came from and also forwards to see the paths they take once they are on your site.

You need to understand if visitors from your various entry pages are viewing your high value content that reinforces your brand and more importantly if they are reaching your ultimate goal of converting them into a customer.

It’s then important to look back at where the visitors came from before they came to the entry page and segment out each source to analyze separately. This will allow you to determine which traffic sources are your top performers and allows you to allocate additional resources to leveraging those sources. This in turn will increase the performance of your site while at the same time saving money by eliminating wasteful spending on campaigns that are underperforming.

The deeper you can dig into the data and the more refined segmentation you can perform the better, but make sure you come back up and bring it full circle by looking at the big picture. Once you’ve extracted the details you need, you must then factor in the costs associated with each traffic source and compare it to what they deliver to your companies bottom line. At the end of the day it doesn’t matter how much data you use in the analysis of your entry pages, if you don’t have the ability to come full circle to make real business decisions then you’re wasting your time and your companies money.

Filed under: Analytics, Education and Training on Thursday, September 27th, 2007 by Nate Linnell | 2 Comments
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