Landing pages are foundational to any effective digital marketing campaign. With the design and copy optimized for your target audience, landing pages can become powerful tools for collecting first party data. Beyond aesthetics however, a lot more goes into the creation of an effective and impactful landing page.
With the recent changes from Universal Analytics (UA) to Google Analytics 4 (GA4), there are now a variety of new features and options that can further prime your landing pages - and subsequently your digital marketing campaigns - for success.
TL;DR
Headline: GA4 now gives you more control over your landing pages, providing insight into the quality and breadth of traffic.
Highlight: GA4 gives you a revised range of tracking options. The most notable change however is the transition of “goals” to “conversions.”
Conversions: The change from “goals'' to “conversions” in GA4 is more than cosmetic. There are different types of conversions now, each with its own unique way of configuration - some predefined and others that can be manually altered.
Embrace UTM codes: To gain in depth insights into the traffic coming to your site, Urchin Tracking Module (UTM) codes will come in handy, especially if you have multiple campaigns running simultaneously.
Recommended action: The shift from UA to GA4 introduces some new terms vital to tracking the effectiveness and overall success of any digital marketing initiative. From events to conversions, goals to UTM parameters - making sure you have the foundations in place will better place your future digital marketing efforts.
How to set up a landing page goal in GA4
If you’ve recently made the transition from UA to GA4, you will notice that the language around specific measures have changed. Specifically, goals are now spoken about as conversions. So when it comes to your landing page and measuring its effectiveness, there are a few ways to go about it.
Resources:
If you've been using goals in Google Analytics for a while, then you will notice that configuring goal conversions in GA4 properties has changed. Before you can report on conversions, you will need to track the particular action as an event into your GA4 property. In this video by Loves Data, Benjamin takes you through the different ways you can set up events and configure conversions.
It might also be helpful to brush up on conversion events in GA4 - start with this guide prepared by Google themselves!
If you’re new to GA4, then I would start with Analytics Mania’s comprehensive guide to conversions in GA4. It covers a ton of ground; from the distinction between goals in UA to conversions in GA4, to creating events and using them to track conversions.
Reporting on landing pages is an important part of assessing the success of any marketing initiative. The team at Loves Data have produced a great video detailing how best to report on landing pages amidst the shift from UA to GA4.
Not necessarily related to goal reporting in GA4 specifically, Hubspot's guide to landing page best practice gets you to think through the reason you might need a landing page in the first place. With eleven factors to best practice, this comprehensive resource will ensure that you craft the best possible landing page for conversion.
Using UTM codes in GA4
Generating traffic is one thing, but understanding where the traffic is coming from and what kind of traffic it is can become messy. That’s why using Urchin Tracking Module (UTM) codes are important. Referring to snippets of code — attached to the end of a URL — UTM codes are used to measure the effectiveness of digital marketing campaigns. At a minimum, they must include a traffic source, a medium, and a campaign name.
Resources:
A great resource to begin with if you’re new to UTM codes, the team at Spinutech have published an in-depth guide on everything you need to know about them. A Google Premier Partner, they cover off the five UTM parameters, tracking examples and how to view the code data in Google Analytics.
In this post by Google, they cover how adding parameters to URLs can help identify the campaigns that refer traffic.
An incredibly handy tool to have bookmarked when building out UTM codes. Google’s campaign URL builder allows you to easily add campaign parameters to URLs so you can measure Custom Campaigns in Google Analytics.
A Google Analytics Certified Partner, this article by the team at Glow Metrics provides great insight into custom campaign tagging using UTM codes in GA4. Going through the benefits of tagging using UTM codes to industry best practice, you’ll leave the article feeling more confident in executing on your custom campaign tagging strategy.
In this video, the team at Measure School details the process of creating custom UTM parameters. With the help of Google Tag Manager, the video details how UTM’s allow you to easily track custom variables and campaigns, and see the data directly in Google Analytics.