Landing Pages
TL;DR
A landing page can have multiple meanings depending on what you do, but in analytics terms, it refers to the first visited page on a website within a session. Knowing your top start pages on the website or where visitors land first when they reach a site helps identify trends, well-ranked pages, and interesting content for visitors.
What is a Landing Page or a Start Page?
A landing page can have multiple definitions, depending on your area of expertise: the URL destination of your ad, a page specially designed to collect e-mail addresses (lead gen type of page) by offering something in exchange (e.g., ebooks, icons, etc.), an entirely separate page from your website that was designed to make a specific action (e.g., sign-up).
For most analytics tools, though, a landing page is the first visited page of a session.
As the metric name suggests, the landing page is the start page where the visitors first land on your website - and it is not necessarily the home page.
Various analytics tools may call a Landing Page different names: Start Page, Entry page, or Entrance Page.
Why is the Landing Page important?
People land on your website through different pages - e.g., a product page or a specific blog post.
By analyzing the Top Start Pages in your dashboard, you can easily see:
- Which page converts best and drives more traffic. Once identified, you can go through these pages and optimize them to engage your visitors with the other pages of your site as well.
- How well your ads and campaigns are performing, based on the destinations URLs you used
- The well-ranked pages of your site. If you do not run any campaign, start pages drive organic traffic to your site, most likely. Therefore, you can identify what type of content is well-indexed in search engines and across the web and re-iterate its structure and direction across the other pages of your site.
- Trends. If there is a new trend across the web in terms of topics or products, and people just started looking for it, you may see a spike in visits for the pages that match the trend as well. If this is the case, you can optimize the page for the trend and run a promo or a viral campaign.
