Landing Pages and what people actually buy

Of course you know what your top landing pages are

But if you haven’t already done so, create an advanced segment for each of your main landing pages, including the homepage.

Then apply each segment in turn and make a note of **what products visitors actually bought **in the Ecommerce section. It can be quite eye-opening, as was the case in my example. Your data may look completely different, but the analysis is valuable all the same.

The 3rd most visited landing page sold a grand total of 10 different products:

The 2nd most visited landing page sold a grand total of 24 products:

And visitors who landed on the homepage ended up buying….drum roll…903 different products during the same time period!

Not only does the homepage have to work overtime to route visitors to the right product pages, but it has to do so without much help from descriptive referring keywords – how do you infer intent from visitors searching for your brand name? I had written about homepage segmentation before and we also know that visitors typically click in order, so how you do you arrange content on the homepage knowing that the homepage is the starting point for so many orders?

The answer I believe has to do with lift. If you highlight a product in the most prominent #1 spot on the homepage it will likely sell more because of that location. What you really want to know is what product gives you the most incremental revenue over any other product in the same location. This would be a great thing to test

And while we are it, if you are sending paid search traffic to the homepage you should allocate that cost among the products you feature on the homepage, particularly if visitors click on it. Kevin Hillstrom calls it on site attribution in his almanac.

Want to be featured on the homepage? You have to earn it!