How to Interpret Landing Page Results for Pay Per Call and Boost Conversions

When your Pay Per Call ad is just right and positioned perfectly, it can feel like you’re printing money, especially if you’re more experienced in the affiliate marketing industry. That’s the result we all chase – that $1 in, $2 out equation. Of course, we all focus on the headline, the copy, and the targeting, but what really makes the money?

The landing page.

If you know this, then you’re on your way to wildly successful PPC campaigns, but how do you make sure your landing page converts, and how do you figure out where you might have problems with your current one?

Is my landing page really the problem?

Probably – at least, it is if you’re getting clicks but no buys (or clicks through to the next offer). As an affiliate marketer, we’re going to assume you’ve done your research and you know the product is selling elsewhere. If you’re getting clicks on your ad but not on your landing page, then that’s where the problem lies.

But how can you go about interpreting what’s wrong and what isn’t? First, look at your page analytics.

Wait! What’s a good conversion rate?

A good conversion rate really varies depending on your offer – for example, if you’re offering something for free but you still get affiliate income based on future expected purchases, then you’re going to get a higher conversion rate because you’re not asking for much – most likely just an email address.

Conversely, if you’re trying to sell a $1,999 course off a single sales page, then your conversions are going to be super low, even if they’re “good” for a PPC campaign. You can expect your landing page conversion rate to vary anywhere between 1-30%, generally, with anything over 25% being considered very good.

How do you analyze landing page analytics?

If you’re using landing page software such as ClickFunnels, then you’re going to have built-in analytics somewhere on your dashboard, but otherwise, Google Analytics is your best choice. Regardless, the analytics you see will be pretty much the same.

What metrics matter for analyzing landing pages?

The most important analytics are:

• Number of people who land on your page (page views)
• Bounce rate (how quickly they leave your page)
• Session duration (the length of time for which they visit your page)
• Pages per session (how many pages they view on your site while they’re there)

The metric that matters most – since if your click through rate is good, your page views should be concurrent – is bounce rate. Pages per session won’t matter if you’ve only got a single page, and session duration definitely matters, but only because you’re not getting the conversions you’d like.

Checking your landing page views …

If you’re having a problem with your conversions, first compare your CTR on your ads platform and your page views. Are they what you’re expecting? If you’ve got one ad and one landing page, they should be exactly the same. If you know your landing page is linked to elsewhere, then it may differ slightly, but it shouldn’t be lower.

Most analytics platforms will tell you which links are driving traffic, so you should be able to double check this, as well.

While you’re there, take a look at the daily views breakdown. Can you see any pattern since you’ve been running your ad? Do you get the same traffic at the same time of day, or week? If you are getting some conversions and have analytics set up for your affiliate link, compare the two.

You may find, for example, that you’re getting great conversions in the evening and over lunchtime on the east coast, but almost nothing on the west. You could try setting up an ad set to only focus on that time zone and see if your conversions change for the better.

Look at your bounce rate.

How high is your bounce rate? If your bounce rate is high and your session time is short, there’s a good chance that means your ad and your landing page don’t align. If people are happily clicking on your ad but leave your page within the first five seconds, then there is room for improvement.

Session length is important.

How much time are people spending on your landing page? Does it make sense for the content that’s there?

A great way to know the length of time an attentive user should be on your page before clicking through to the next page or to the offer is to ask a family member or someone else you can sit with in-person and ask them to read through the landing page. Don’t worry if they’re not the target audience (though of course if they are, all the better!), all you need to do is sit there with a timer and simply observe how long it takes them to reach each section.

You can repeat the exercise if you assume some visitors will skip certain sessions or a video. It’s also fine if you need to do this on your own, but it helps to have someone else look at it for accuracy because you’ve looked at the landing page dozens of times, meaning it might not read the same way.

Compare these times to your average session length and see where it may suggest they’re falling off. Do you have a video you’re sure they’re not watching? Do they only make it a third of the way down the page? Are they glancing at it and leaving? Make some notes about what you think, as this will help you for the next session.

Pages per session also matter …

If you have multiple pages incorporated into the customer journey followed by your landing page, it should be fairly easy to tell where visitors are getting stuck. If the average page session is three, and your offer isn’t until page five, then that’s the sticking point.

If you have a menu on your landing page that sends visitors to other pages within the rest of your site (but you intend to use this one URL as a standalone landing page), remove the menu so that visitors won’t get distracted by the option to navigate elsewhere. If you’re using a single landing page and you can see you’re getting an average of multiple pages per session, your visitors are moving off that page and around your site.

Chances are, if you are paying for ads, you don’t want to pay for traffic that simply navigates away from the offer, even if visitors stay on your site. Take a look at the average session time for your entire site if this is the case and see if they’re spending a lot of time in your world or not. In most cases, it’s better if your landing page is just one single page. If you need to have more than just one page, keep your visitor journey to a maximum of three pages.

How to know what to fix to optimize your landing page.

Hopefully, after interpreting all this data you at least have an idea of where the weak points are. Consider the following:

• Does your offer align with the ad copy?
• Is the tone of the copy on the landing page off?
• What kind of layout would your target customer expect?
• Is the design turning them off?
• Do they get at least some of the information they came here for?
• Are any images or videos turning them off?
• Is there a section that’s confusing or boring to visitors?
• Is the offer clear?
• Are the CTAs clear?
• Are the links working as they should?
• Is anything not loading or loading too slowly? 

Even if you correct some of these missteps, you still might notice that there could be improvement in some of these areas. Testing out these changes and rolling them out bit by bit so that you understand which revision made which impact is key to optimizing your landing page for higher revenue.

When you get this right, it feels like making money is the easiest thing in the world. Don’t be intimidated by changing up your landing page strategy and design – testing will help and you’ll figure out what elements of the page make it easier to generate revenue in the end. Some offers you’ll hit it out of the park on the first couple of tries, others will take months of testing to get down. One thing’s for certain: it will be worth it in the end!

---