If you’re investing in affiliate marketing and have created some really captivating  banners for your affiliates, or maybe you’re investing a lot in PPC this holiday season.

Are you simply looking at whether a marketing effort is converting and bringing in sales? Are you ignoring the step-by-step process visitors are going through from the marketing effort, to final conversion point, and making some assumptions for why one marketing effort might be converting more effectively than another?

Don’t just look at conversion rates, bounce rates, and click through rates this holiday season. Become an investigative reporter and find some meaning behind WHY something is happening, instead of just acknowledging ‘WHAT’ is happening.

Start by looking at your top landing pages and highlight your top 3 landing pages. For each of these top landing pages, find out the traffic sources that are driving traffic to each page. If search is driving traffic, then dig deeper and find out what the top 5 – 10 traffic driving keywords are for these top landing pages.

Now, you need to make some assumptions about the motivations and needs of the visitors who are coming to these top landing pages from these sources. The keywords visitors are typing when searching can tell us a lot about what they are looking for. The banner ad or other marketing efforts might be using specific language that can tell us a lot about what the visitor was hoping to find when she clicked.

Once you have come up with some ideas about the motivations and needs your visitors have when they come from the marketing effort to your landing pages, you need to follow through and determine if you’re effectively speaking to these needs and motivations on these top landing pages when the visitor gets there.

Are you featuring some of the keywords they were searching for, or that you used in the marketing effort to persuade her to click, in headlines on the landing page? Are you effectively providing the visitor various ways to navigate and move forward based on their motivations and needs? Are you providing a look and feel that is consistent with the marketing efforts or what the visitor is searching for?

Remember, one of the highest impact areas of your site are the top landing pages.

You can get the best “bang for your buck” by providing more effective ’scent of information’ from your marketing efforts to your landing pages. You’ll not only experience lower bounce rates, but you’ll also reduce the likelihood that the visitor will drop out at the next click, because you’ll be leading her down the path she wanted, and expected, to follow.