Seeing where people first land on your site or app can help you improve your customer experience and your marketing efforts. For example, you can see which pages or screens need more focus so you can make them more relevant or useful.
About the metrics
The Entrances metric shows the number of times the first event in a session happened on a page or screen. On the other hand, Exits shows how many times the last event in a session happened on a page or screen.
Both of these metrics are available in Explore. You don't need to configure your site or app to collect data for entrances and exits.
Example
A user has a series of single-session days on your site:
- Monday: Enter > Page B > Page A > Page C > Exit
- Tuesday: Enter > Page B > Exit
- Wednesday: Enter > Page A > Page C > Page B > Exit
- Thursday: Enter > Page C > Exit
- Friday: Enter > Page B > Page C > Page A > Exit
Entrances:
- Page A: 1 (3 sessions included Page A, 1 session entered through Page A)
- Page B: 3 (4 sessions included Page B, 3 sessions entered through Page B)
- Page C: 1 (4 sessions included Page C, 1 session entered through Page C)
Exits:
- Page A: 1 (3 sessions included Page A, 1 session exited from Page A)
- Page B: 2 (4 sessions included Page B, 2 sessions exited from Page B)
- Page C: 2 (4 sessions included Page C, 2 sessions exited from Page C)
See entrances and exits
One way to see data about entrances and exits is to go to Explore and create a free-form exploration.
For example, let's say you want to identify the pages that people are landing on and leaving from. You could create a free-form exploration called "Entrances and Exits". The exploration could use the Page title and screen class dimension with the two metrics.
Entrances vs. landing page
A landing page is the first page someone lands on when they visit your website. For example, let's say someone clicks an ad that goes to a clothing page on your website. In this case, the landing page is the clothing page that the user landed on.
The Landing page dimension shows the page path and query string of the landing page. For example, let's say the URL of a landing page is "www.example.com/home?theme=1." In this case, you will see "/home?theme=1" in the "Landing page" column of the report.
In the example from earlier, Page A, Page B, and Page C are all landing pages. Page B would be the landing page users visit most often.
A key difference between Entrances and Landing page is that Entrances is a metric and Landing page is a dimension. The Entrances metric shows the number of times that the first event in a session occurred on a page or screen. The Landing page dimension shows the specific pages that users landed on.