How Landing Page Reports Help Identify Problem Content

Wednesday Sep 03 2008
by Canada's Web Shop

Your traffic is only as good as the page it lands on

Part of your monthly statistics summary includes a landing page report (below)

The primary purpose of this report is to show you which pages on your site get the most visitors. 

This report is extremely valuable because it can help you identify problem pages where it counts: The top visited pages.

Landing Page Analysis & Insights

With this report you can examine your top visited pages and get an idea of whether or not there’s a problem with them. 

Looking at this report you can see that the bounce rate for the “/rings-wedding-band” page is over 85%.  This means that of the 61 visits, 52 of them left the page without proceeding further into your site.  This could indicate several types of problems which will need to be addressed in order to reduce that number. 

For example, there may not be a clear direction as to where to proceed from that page.  You could encourage further navigation into the site by adding a prominent button or link back to the home page both at the end of the copy and the beginning near the top of the page.

If it’s a sales page you could make the “Buy Now” button more visible by making it larger or changing its color. 

You could implement what are known as Bread Crumbs at the top of the page so that a visitor can back-track to a higher page level.  For example if this is a product page then they would see at the top:

“You are at: Home > Products > Rings > Wedding Bands”

Now they can click on the “Wedding Bands” link to get to the higher level of Wedding Bands and view all wedding bands in your inventory. 

As always, make one change at a time and then monitor the results in your statistics summary to determine whether or not the change negatively or positively affected your bounce rate. 

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