Landing Pages: How to Calculate ROI to Connect Marketing & Sales
/
As marketers, we often have to prove that our efforts are worthwhile and contributing to the company's bottom line. Calculating the ROI is part and parcel to the process of proving our worth. Determining the ROI of landing pages is essential for improving lead quality, understanding visitor behaviors, and increasing conversion. Now, a high ROI can look different for many companies; there is no "one size fits all" approach to calculating it.
With that being said, if you're not using Google Analytics, then you don't know if your marketing efforts are really paying off. Marketing should always be in service of sales and a digital campaign that can prove its worth is an asset. Assessing the ROI of a landing page should always be a part of your campaign strategy, so you should have a member of your team that is familiar with Google Analytics (on our team, it's me!). In this article, I will go over how to determine if your landing pages are generating revenue for your company.
Establish KPIs
There may be specific key performance indicators for your business (like specific referral channels), but in general, these are the things you should be paying attention to:
Traffic
Lead Generation
Conversions
Building traffic should be the first thing to check off on your to-do list. Without significant traffic (around 10k per month), it's next to impossible to calculate the other bullet points listed above. If you don't have traffic coming to your page, consider focusing on promoting your content before you go further.
Traffic: Who is Converting?
Defining your audience is step one. In order to achieve the highest ROI you can, your page needs to attract the segment with the most buying power within your audience. The Audience tool in Google analytics is helpful to evaluate what types of people are converting on your landing page. You can also use Google Search Console for more insight into your organic traffic. Which search terms are leading to conversions on your page? This information is needed to determine if the traffic coming to your page is good quality and likely to convert.
Is the traffic that is coming to your landing page through social media posts converting? If not, consider focusing your efforts on a PPC (pay per click) campaign or sending out a press release with a link to your page in it. In addition to calculating the ROI of your content, Google Analytics should be your go-to tool as a constant gut-check for all of your marketing efforts.
Setting Conversion Goals
Once you have a defined audience and identified traffic to your page, you need to deduce what percentage of traffic is converting. To do this, you first have to set up goals in Google Analytics. Need some help? Here's a how-to straight from the horse's mouth. After you've set up your goals, Google will calculate the conversion rate for your page.
Your goals can and should look different depending on the type of landing page you've built. The goal for a landing page with gated content (like an e-book) would be a simple download. Since this action doesn't have an attached revenue, you'll need to do a bit more work to determine if the leads that downloaded the e-book came back to your site and made a purchase. Goals like this example that take place in the early stages of the buyer journey are still essential factors in the value of your page, so you should be sure to include them in your tracking efforts.
ROI: How to Get the Whole Story
Determining the ROI of your landing page is like putting together a puzzle. You can't see the full picture until you've put all the pieces in place. When going to your sales team or higher management to prove that your marketing efforts are paying off, you'll need to provide context as well as hard figures. As I mentioned above, understanding the traffic that is coming to your landing page in addition to the traffic that is converting on your landing page is critical in calculating the ROI. What percentage of traffic is converting and where are those leads coming from? Is the effort spent attracting traffic to your page worth it? These are some of the questions you will need to be able to answer.
Sales is (obviously) most concerned with generating revenue, but it's also important to give them an understanding of actions users are taking on your page that are in the earlier stages of the buyer journey. These actions are critical in making the final sale. Users that download a sales kit on your landing page may be coming back to buy something. You will need to be able to track this traffic to determine the percentage of returning users that are making a purchase or generating revenue in some other way. Even if your landing page does not have a direct buy option, you need to be able to prove its worth when it comes to your company's bottom line.
As we've seen, when it's time to determine the ROI of a landing page, Google Analytics is your best friend. I mean, it should always be your best friend but especially in this situation. If you're not familiar with it, there are tons of tutorials online, and Google's Analytics Help portal is always my first go-to when I need help. Gathering data, learning from it and using it to guide future actions are all important aspects of marketing your brand. Using that data to determine the ROI of your marketing efforts, including landing pages, is a needed practice to ensure the success of your brand.