In the world of marketing online, knowing as much information on the data behind the scenes is crucial. Knowing which website pages people are first accessing on your website is an important data point for you to be aware of.
Have you ever wondered what pages your users are arriving at your website on? The answer might be more accessible than you think it is. This information can be extremely helpful for you if you are looking to improve your website. It will also be useful if you’re trying to figure out a reason why you may not be getting as many sales as you want to.
Let’s discuss the reports that tell you which pages on your website that visitors first arrive to.
What is a Landing Page?
We keep discussing this idea of a web page that users first interact with, but did you know that these pages actually have a name? In the world of the internet, these pages are called landing pages.
You may have another idea of what a landing page might be, as this term refers to another type of web page. We know it is confusing, but the term “landing page” can refer to both types of web pages.
The first type is a standard landing page. This is a page on a website that you are purposefully directing people to. It may be designed to provide useful information on your brand or business. Another use for a landing page is to collect contact information.
You may also want to use this web page to try to urge your new visitor to complete a sale. To remember this meaning, think of this type of landing page as you intentionally giving your users a place to land.
The second type of landing page is the type that we are going to be referring to throughout this article. In this usage, landing page simply refers to the page that your visitor first landed on when they came to your website. This is regardless of where they came from or what page they first accessed.
For this usage of the term “landing page” there are multiple pages on your website that could be potential landing pages. Your visitors could have found the link to one of your product pages on Instagram and came to your website that way. They also may have found your homepage on Google and accessed your site that way.
Even though these pages and sources of traffic are very different, both of the pages accessed are referred to as landing pages.
So, Where Do You Find Landing Page Analytics?
Now that you know what exactly you are looking for, let’s go over the report that will help you find out the answer to your question. The report that we are most familiar with to give you the raw data that you are looking for is the Google Analytics Landing Pages report.
This report provides you all that you could ever wish to know about your landing pages. It will tell you what you want to know and more. The Google Analytics Landing Pages report will tell you the web pages that your web traffic is first arriving at. However, it can also give you the information that will tell you which of your pages are the last pages that this visitor views.
This information will not tell you why people are leaving, however, it will only tell you which pages are the last pages that your visitors are seeing or using. If this page is the same page that your visitor landed on, there may be some things that you should consider.
How Can You Use This Information to Improve Your Website Pages?
Based on analytics like these alone, it is hard to say what changes need to be made for your website. You will have the information of both how people got to your landing pages and also which pages your visitors decided to leave from. However, depending on this data, you may find that you don’t need to make any changes.
You can use this information on which pages your visitors are first seeing and interacting with in order to decide where you may want to make some improvements, though.
1. Thinking about the quality of your landing pages
For example, let’s say your audience is most often coming to your website through a blog post on your website that seems to be increasing in traffic online. They are coming to your site for the blog post, reading the blog post, and then leaving afterwards.
There are many reasons that this might happen. This could be because the language that you are including on your website isn’t persuasive enough to get them to stay. It could also be that there is no easy way to access your other pages from this page. Another reason could be that you don’t mention or include links to any of your other pages.
2. Asking your visitors
Another way that you might want to use this information is in conjunction with some opinion data from your website visitors. You can consider adding a survey to your website that offers a discount in order to collect information about the quality of your site.
You may not get many answers from people who are clicking on your website pages and leaving right away, but you could still get some useful information to use along with your data in order to give your website some direction.
Consider these elements when you are viewing this data and reference your website to see if any of these things may be the case.
Conclusion and Takeaway
To wrap things up, we’ve discussed what landing pages are, how to access the landing pages report on Google Analytics, and how you may use this report to make improvements to your website.
Now that you know which report to view to see where visitors are landing on your website pages, do you think there are any changes to be made? Let us know in the comments what you find out about your web traffic on your site!
Image by rawpixel.com on Freepik