Website Statistics Report: Entry Pages

Overview

The Entry Page report lists all pages on your website and the number of times within the log that each is an Entry Page. An Entry Page is the first page requested by a visitor when they access your site. The nature of the Internet means that this is not always going to be your home page as visitors will find your website by a number of methods. This report can help you analyse and optimise this aspect of the visitor behaviour for your website.

For example Search Engines, such as Google, Microsoft Live Search and Yahoo, are one of the largest drivers of web visitors. Search Engines crawl each page of your site and index them based on the words and content they contain. These are matched to search terms so if your website sells mobile phones and you have a product page for a specific model, when somebody performs a search on Google they will be shown a link directly to your model details page, by-passing all others including your home page. When the user clicks this link and comes through to your site, the first page they will see will be the model details page. This makes this page an entry page.

Equally if another website links to your website they may link to a specific sub-page. You can use the Referrers report to find out what these links are, but in the context of this report, the page they link to will be the Entry Page for any visitors following this link.

Therefore this report can tell you a number of useful things including the pages that perform well in search engines such as Google, Microsoft Live Search and Yahoo and pages that are linked to frequently by other sites, although using the referrers report can give you even more information about this.

A useful exercise...

Once you know what your websites main Entry Pages are put yourself in the position of a first time visitor to your website and look at these pages again. For example it is a good idea to ensure they contain clear directions and links to other parts of your site where you wish them to go. Additionally as you can tell by the content of the Entry Page why they have arrived and what they are likely to be most interested in you can direct them to other pages that they may find interesting.

Taking our mobile phone details Entry Page as example, it is clear that the visitor has arrived here because of their desire to know about a mobile phone, so there is relatively little point linking to another part of your site which deals in your specialist home Banana delivery service, but it makes a lot of sense to place a link to a page that lists all your mobile phones for sale or even a mobile phone search feature.

Running through this exercise is an ongoing effort and you should check back to the Entry Pages report often to keep your site optimised for maximum visitor captivation.

Report Options

This report has two primary modes. Entry Pages can be listed by using the <title> tag or the URL. Depending on your website setup you can choose which is most useful. The Popular Pages report document has lots of good advice about setting up the <title> tags on your site and is worth reading.

If you use the “By Url” method the Url any query string parameters are shown, however all of your Websites base Urls, as set in Website Settings > Website Configuration > Website Urls, are not included. This is to make the report tidier and more viewable. However you can include these by checking the “Show Base Urls” check box.

Additionally as with most reports you can choose the date range that this report runs. There is also a printer friendly version which is available by clicking the icon in the top right of the report.

How this Report Works with the Log

Log size is very important to this report as each log record represents the data for one session. If your log is full you will be losing the oldest record with each new visitor so increase the log size to store more data and analyse trends further back in time.

If you are performing optimisations to your website that are aimed at increasing the average return count make sure you have enough log space to store both historical data and sufficient new data to put your optimisations to the test.

To understand how to get best use of this report read Managing Website Session Log help document.

Optimising your site for this Report

This report requires no special treatment to get the best out of it other than the standard bullet points of …

• Ensure that the tracking code is placed on every page of your site
• Ensure that your log is as big as possible.
• Use this report in conjunction with the Referrers Report to build up a picture of where visitors to your site come from.