Understanding Google Analytics Entrance Paths

I also spend much more time looking at navigation summary, and only look at entrance paths occasionally.

Entrance paths are useful when you want to know if visitors who arrive on a particular landing page are really proceeding where you want them to go. For example, I'm looking at entrance paths for my most-viewed page. It says "This page was viewed 57 times", but of course not all of those were entrances.

To see how many were entrances (how many visitors actually landed on the page) I have to count the visits under "Then viewed these pages:". The total of the Visits column is 8.

Okay, so what did they do? Well, strangely, 3 of them viewed the exact same page next. I don't think they clicked refresh; I think they saw the article title listed in the page navigation area, and clicked it because it looked like a good match for the original search that brought them to the page in the first place. If you think about it, someone googling for some search query is not paying attention to the title when they click a page in the results list. So they land on your page, are not satisfied, and immediately look for something else useful. In my case, I can see I just disappointed 3 out of 8 visitors, TWICE. Ouch.

Anyway, 2 visitors followed a link to an alternate version of the landing page, targeting the opposite sex. I view this is a positive: I put that link there so male visitors could find what they really want, instead of leaving because they landed on the women's page.

1 visitor clicked a link to an unrelated article. Meh.

2 visitors pursued my target action. So, 2 out of 8, or 25% of visitors who landed on this page, did what I want them to do.

Plus there's a potential action item for me: if I weren't lazy, I could make sure each page doesn't have links to itself.

Mostly, in the past, I have used the Entrance Paths report to make decisions about removing internal links from an article (if not enough visitors were pursuing my target action). Also, the report has sometimes exposed my need to make the target action more obvious on a landing page.

Navigation Summary, on the other hand -- I use that to tell me which articles are the best performers... meaning which articles are best at provoking visitors to do what I want them to do. When an article performs well, I boost its presence on the site by providing more internal links to it.

HTH, -- Patey (I had to go look up TBH, you know. Sigh.)