What is the difference between clicks and landing page views?

Clicks & Landing Page Views - The small but subtle difference

Simply put, the "subtle" difference between a click and a landing page view (LPV) is nothing more than whether a page was loaded or not. Any good performance marketing agency would optimize for landing page views where possible, and similar to visible and normal impressions, it is important to determine whether the generated click has also produced "value". Accordingly, clicks are only valuable if they have become LPVs. Just as people only perceive visible impressions, only users who have actually landed on a landing page can evaluate products and services. Especially in a mobile world, the difference between clicks and landing page views can be huge.

Here is a small example from a real meta ads account.

Where does the difference come from?

As already shown, the difference lies mainly in the fact that an outbound click from Facebook, Instagram or Google does not result in a page being fully loaded. There are usually 3 reasons for this. Either the person has clicked by mistake and immediately canceled the loading of the page or clicked back. The page has taken too long to load or the internet connection is poor. The latter two points can sometimes serve each other. You should always make sure that your page can also be loaded quickly on mobile devices.

Why are Landing Page Views better?

As already mentioned, LPVs measure what we want to achieve by "buying" traffic or clicks. Users who engage with our content on our site. Clicks alone are useless if nobody reaches the website. And this is exactly why you should use this metric instead of clicks. If you currently pay 30 cents per click, but at the same time you know that only 60% of the clicks also load your target page, you are actually paying 40% more than your CPC. Accordingly, in this example you are actually paying 50 cents for meaningful clicks. In times of ad fraud, bots and fake profiles that generate traffic, the consideration of clicks has become pointless.

If you have less than 10% difference between landing page views and clicks, you shouldn't worry about it. However, if your figures look similar to our example, you should rethink your control logic.

In the old days, everything in paid search was optimized for clicks, nobody was interested in landing page views (LPV). How high is the CPC and how many clicks were generated? The basic thinking about clicks remains to this day, but simply put, it's stupid. Landing page views are in every way the bettermetric to understand how expensive and valuablepurchased traffic is.

How do I recognize bad traffic?

You can also use metrics like bounce rate and dwell time on your site to help you gauge your traffic quality, but the ratio of clicks to LPVs is simple and very telling. Please note! The dwell time in Google Analytics is only measured up to the exit page by default. Accordingly, someone could be on your exit page for 5 minutes, but GA would not display it correctly. By combining these metrics, you are sure to find good quality campaigns.

How do I measure landing page views with Google Ads?

The simple answer: not at all. Unfortunately, Google does not give us this option by default. Even when linking Google Analytics and Google Ads, we do not receive any figures on the successful loading of our clicks. You would either have to select a special Google Analytics configuration or store landing page views as conversions in Google Ads.