The Simplest Way to Identify Underperforming Landing Pages

For a free tool, Google Analytics can be a powerful way to spot areas where your website is underperforming. Many of us don’t have time to drill down into the data and spot individual numbers, so Google made this easier by including a few simple visualizations to help make underperforming landing pages stand out more.

To easily identify a landing page with a high bounce rate, go to your ‘Top Landing Pages’ section inside Google Analytics, and use the ‘comparison’ view, while displaying your top entrance pages. Make sure that you are comparing ‘bounce rate’ to site average.

The resulting visualization will show which landing pages have a lower bounce rate in green along with a bar and percentage value – and the pages with a higher bounce rate will have a red bar and a percentage value to indicate how much worse they’re doing.

This can be a great starting point for an investigation into why certain pages are underperforming. For instance, a page with a high bounce rate could:

Lack a definite call to action at either the top of bottom of the page text.
Contain broken links or out-of-date content.
Be the main landing page for a particular type of traffic (mobile or international traffic, for example) that does not perform well for other reasons.
Be a landing page that is meant to differentiate valid customers from invalid ones.

In other words, if you can’t explain why a landing page should have a high bounce rate, it’s worth investigating and fixing. It should also be noted that if a page has a high bounce rate but is also able to help achieve a goal or make a sale, then more analysis needs to be done before content is rewritten or layout is changed.

Of course, this is also a great opportunity to perform some A/B tests on your website to see if you can improve on your best (or even your worst) pages.

There’s no shortage of analytics data out there to dig into. The key is being able to find the data that can have the biggest impact on your organization. Use this simple process to find out which pages are underperforming and then correct them to make sure that visitors have a better experience on your website.

PublicInsite Web Analytics Inc.
Google Analytics Certified Partner

Ben Myers