Entry Pages Reports: Which pages are making a good first impression?
Entry Pages are essentially the first page a visitor loads on your site within a single visit. There are many factors that can contribute to which page enters your site from. For example, somebody visiting after you passed them a business card might land on your homepage, a search visitor might be more likely to land on one of your blog posts, a registered user might land deep within your site from a linked bookmark, and others still might enter on a landing page linked from a marketing campaign.
Entry pages play an important part of your website. For new visitors, entry pages provide the first impression they will get from your website. Returning visitors will often have different requirements and may arrive at different pages first (you can check this by creating a segment where “Visitor Type” is “returning”) but it is also important to ensure that their needs are being met too.
Wherever a user first lands, it will be reported on the Entry Pages table. At its most basic, you can use this report to understand which pages users most frequently enter your site from. However, with a little creativity you can use this report with the Matomo Segments feature to understand other influencing factors that affect which page a visitor enters from.
Arguably, the most important metric on this page is Entrances. This is the number of visits that have started on each page over the currently selected time period. Typically, the more people that enter your site through a specific page, the more important it is to optimise for the rest of the metrics on the page.
Bounce Rates: Are you making a good first impression?
Somebody arriving at your site is only half of the equation. If they load your homepage but hate what they see and immediately leave, then your business won’t go very far. This is where the Bounce Rate comes in. Bounces are when someone enters your site on a specific page and immediately leaves from that page without taking any other tracked action such as visiting a second page.
You can use this metric as a gauge for how “sticky” the landing pages on your site are. If the majority of your visitors enter your website on a page with a high bounce rate, you might need to spend some time optimising that page to encourage more visits to other sections of your website.
For most pages, you should generally aim to have as low a bounce rate as possible. When you reduce the Bounce Rate on a page with lots of Entrances, it is likely to lead to a larger number of people staying to explore your site. One other consideration you should keep in mind is, if you only have a few Entrances on a page, then your Bounce Rate may not be a useful indicator of its future success. A Bounce Rate percentage based on a page with one or two Entrances is much less likely to accurately predict future trends than a page with thousands of Entrances.
Are Your Pages Loading Fast Enough?
Another key metric on the Entry Pages report is the Avg. Page Load Time. This tells you the exact time it took for each page to load on average.
Slow page loading times are one of the most common reasons that people bounce from a website. When a user clicks from a search and it takes almost 10 seconds before they even see any content, impatience kicks in and you are likely to find yourself with a bounced user.
If you notice pages with a higher than average bounce rate, you may want to check if your Avg. Page Load Time is slower than average for that page. If so, you may want to remove heavy media such as background videos and large images which can increase your load times. Even if a page doesn’t have a high bounce rate, if you notice that a specific page is taking a long time to load, you should probably spend some time optimising it, as faster page load times have consistently been proven to improve user engagement and conversions.
Learn more in our site speed user guide here.
How to Access the Entry Page Titles Report
By default the Entry Pages report uses your page URLs, however, you can scroll to the bottom of the table and click on the Entry page titles link within the Related report section.
If you’d prefer to analyse pages by their title instead of their URL, you can use the Entry Page Titles report instead. You can access this from the Entry Pages report by scrolling down to the bottom of the table where you will see a Related reports section. Here you can click on Entry page titles to view the title based version instead.