Customer Experience Analytics Formula Blog

Optimize Marketing Landing Pages to Drive Marketing Effectiveness

Posted by Steven Perry on Sep 27, 2017 7:00:00 AM

Introduction

There are a lot of factors to consider when developing your marketing strategy and campaigns.   One very important component that deserves special focus is the marketing landing page.   In many ways, your marketing landing pages are the heart of your campaigns and play a crucial role in a campaign’s success.  A great landing page not only serves to generate leads and create conversions, but tracking performance of your marketing landing pages can provide valuable insight you can use to better align your marketing strategies and maximize the effectiveness of your campaigns.   So, how do you go about ensuring your marketing landing pages are optimized to support your business objectives?

 

Analysis Overview

In this analysis, we will show how using marketing optimization reports can provide you an end-to-end view of the effectiveness of your marketing landing pages, offering insight from your customer behaviors that can assist you with optimizing your marketing landing pages to help improve engagements, enhance customer experiences and maximize conversions.

 

Analysis Benefits

  • Optimize marketing landing pages and maximize effectiveness of marketing campaigns utilizing a better understanding of customer behaviors and interactions.
  • Uncover usability and design flaws on your landing pages for increased visibility into areas requiring improvements and fine-tuning.
  • Utilize marketing insights to make better-informed decisions on how to best align your marketing strategy and improve campaign performance.


Analysis Formula

This customer experience analytics (CXA) formula will explain how you can use marketing optimization reports and usability analytics in Watson Customer Experience Analytics (CXA) to track landing page performance and identify areas for improvement on your marketing landing page design and overall campaign marketing strategy.   With this insight, you are better able to optimize your landing pages to improve the customer experiences and conversions while maximizing your marketing efforts and budgets.

Create MMC codes used in generating attribution reports

Step 1
Create the Marketing Management Center tracking codes (MMC codes) used in attribution reports in Watson CXA utilizing the Tracking Code Generator. The attribution reports, such as the Marketing Channels and Marketing Program reports, allow you to track key campaign performance indicators and monitor the performance of your marketing channel to identify trends that may be a concern or require immediate attention.   If you need help or missed our earlier Watson CXA formula, “Getting Started with Marketing Codes and Attribution Reporting,” click here.
  1. Use the Marketing Channels report to track key performance indicators for each channel, such as bounce rate, conversion rate, sales, or percent share of traffic, and monitor for significant changes in performance that might signal a concern.
  2. Use the Marketing Program report that provides a comprehensive view of your online paid marketing activity to drill deeper into your marketing campaigns and help identify potential reasons for changes in performance across your paid marketing elements.

Apply usability analytics for increased insight into customer interactions

Apply usability analytics, like heat maps, to evaluate customer behaviors and understand if your landing page design is optimal or if usability improvements are needed to improve your customer experiences and increase conversions.   Heat maps are helpful in identifying where customers are engaging on your page and recognizing areas of your page that may be causing struggles. 

Step 2
Apply heat maps overlay to your landing page to view and compare the customer interactions on a page. Then, segment your heat map data further to help you understand – and quantify -- if your landing page design is causing struggles that lead to customer abandonment.  If you need assistance, refer to our earlier CXA formula, “Applying Heat Maps to Understand Customer Behavior,” click here,

Generate marketing optimization reports to evaluate landing page performance

A successful marketing campaign – and optimized landing page – encompasses more than one strong component.   So, creating an end-to-end view of campaign activities – before, during and after engagements with your landing pages – allows you to pinpoint what elements are working and identify the segments that may be underperforming.  

Step 3
Create a marketing report to track your landing page views by page by day
  1. This is a great first step in helping you quickly understand how all of your landing pages are performing and allows you to zero in on the pages that are readily viewed and those that are not. Is there a landing page or two that really stands out?   Are there pages that peak one day to only drop in views the next?
Marketing Optimization_image 1.png

Example:  Daily landing page views by MMC

Step 4
Create a marketing report to track your daily landing page views by MMC (Marketing Management Center codes) to evaluate the performance of your campaigns.
  1. Understanding how landing pages are performing by campaign allows you to take a further step in identifying what campaigns are driving interest and what campaigns may need fine-tuning or more evaluation. 
Step 5
Create a marketing report to track your daily landing page views by referral source to evaluate how different channels are performing in directing traffic to your landing pages.
  1. This report will help you understand what influencers are driving traffic to your landing pages and what their impact on your campaign is. What marketing channels are driving the most traffic to your pages?   Is there a channel that is underperforming and could be eliminated to conserve budget or perhaps improved to maximize conversions?  
  2. You might then create a report that offers a view of landing page performance by MMC code and referral source allowing you to evaluate if a particular combination of referrals by campaign are working exceptionally well – or perhaps not well at all.
Step 6
Create a marketing report to track call to action (CTA) by landing page to evaluate where users are clicking on once they land on your marketing landing page.
  1. With a better understanding of what channels and what campaigns are driving traffic to your landing pages, you can then begin to take a look at how well your marketing landing pages are performing and driving interest. How well are customers clicking on your CTAs across all your landing pages?   Is there a landing page that received a lot of views, but then CTAs were low?   Is there perhaps a design flaw or poor content placement on your underperforming pages that might be causing confusion or struggle? (Heat maps, as explained above, can help you evaluate if design issues may be an issue.)

Marketing Optimization_image 2.png

Example:  Landing page clicks by landing page

 

Step 7
Create a marketing report to track conversion rates by landing page to identify what landing pages are the most successful in driving users to convert.
  1. Of course, one of the valuable pieces of information is whether your landing pages are leading users to convert to customers. Are there any pages that perform exceptionally well with conversions?   Is there a conversion event you can identify?  Or was there a progression of success factors that contributed to conversion based on your collective review of the marketing reports?
Step 8
Create a marketing report to track conversions by landing page and by MMC and referral source and CTAs to then get a complete end-to-end view of how the combination of marketing elements are working together.
  1. A cumulative report will allow you to understand what marketing elements are working together to drive your business and what elements may need some further evaluation and fine-tuning. In order to best view this aggregate data, format in a table or a stacked bar or create the report with filters so you can refine the views to get a better understanding on how different elements impact your marketing efforts.

 

In order to ensure you can create the appropriate marketing reports, you will want to be sure to have the correct events enabled – like events to capture views on your landing pages, clicks on your CTAs and conversions events.   At the same time, the ability to dimensionalize your marketing data by campaign and channel is key, so it is essential to have the correct MMC codes generated for use in the various marketing reports, so that you can further evaluate what is impacting your campaign performance.  With a better understanding of what is driving your campaigns and leading to conversions, you gain valuable insight you can use to develop optimized marketing landing pages – pages designed to create enriched customer experiences and brand loyalty.   So, with the critical role that landing pages play in your campaigns, an optimized landing page ultimately translates into an optimized campaign driving maximized business results.

 

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Topics: Watson Customer Experience Analytics, Watson CXA, Marketing Optimization, MMC, Marketing Management Center Codes

About this blog

The CXA Formula Blog is designed to provide formulas or recipes in using IBM Watson Customer Experience Analytics and Tealeaf CX on Cloud. This includes formulas in digital analysis, customer experience analytics, journey analytics, and Universal Behavior Exchange. These formulas are designed to provide you insight and best practices in customer analytics.

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