Landing Pages and What Visitors See First

The front door is somewhere else

Most owners think of the home page as the front of the website. It gets the most attention in a redesign, and it is the page they check.

Many visitors never see it. A search for a particular question or service takes them straight to the page that answers it, often deep inside the site.

That page might be an old blog post, a price list or a service page written in an afternoon. For many visitors, it is the whole website.

Universal Analytics shows exactly which pages do that job, in a report most owners have never opened.

Finding the report

In Analytics, the report sits under Behaviour, then Site Content, then Landing Pages. A landing page here is simply the first page of a visit, wherever the visitor came from.

That differs from the advertising meaning, a page built for one campaign. Here, every page on your site is a landing page for somebody.

Set the date range to the last three to six months and sort by sessions.

What the report shows

Five of the figures beside each page matter here.

• Sessions: how many visits began on that page.
• New users: how many of those visitors had not been before.
• Bounce rate: the share who left without viewing a second page.
• Pages per session: how far visitors went after arriving.
• Goal completions: enquiries or bookings from visits that started there.

The second deserves a closer look. A page that mostly greets first-time visitors is introducing your business to strangers, whether or not it was written for that job.

Pages that greet strangers

The list usually holds surprises: an old blog post that ranks well, a page about one particular job, the careers page, a page nobody remembers writing.

Most were written for a reader who already knew the business. They assume the visitor arrived through the home page, so they skip the introduction.

A stranger landing there finds an answer to their question, perhaps a good one, and no sign of who is answering, where they are, or whether they could help.

So the visitor reads, gets what they came for, and leaves. Nothing on the page suggested doing anything else.

A page that stands on its own

A page that greets visitors should pass a simple test: could somebody who has never heard of you, arriving on this page alone, tell what you offer and how to get in touch?

That means the business name and what you do near the top, in words, and where you work. It means a phone number or booking link on the page itself, not only behind a menu.

It also means a next step that fits the page: a post about a problem should lead to the service that solves it, not to a generic contact button.

And it means the page is current. A visitor who lands on old prices or an old address assumes the rest of the site is just as stale.

A worked example

A speech therapy clinic with four therapists in a Port Moody medical building had a site built around its home page: a welcome, photographs of the therapy rooms, the team.

The landing pages report for the first half of the year put the home page third. The most common first page was a two-year-old article about toddlers who are late to talk.

Parents found it by searching their worries late at night. The article was careful and useful, and it never said that the clinic assessed toddlers, where the clinic was, or how to book.

Its only phone number was at the very bottom, under a long column of related posts. Most visits that began on the article ended there too.

The article now opens with a line saying which therapist wrote it, with her qualifications.

It ends with a short section for worried parents: what an assessment involves, the current wait, the phone number and a link to book.

The second most common landing page, the fees page, gained a booking link. Nothing else on the site changed.

Reading bounce rate with care

A high bounce rate on a landing page is not automatically bad. A visitor who lands on the contact page, finds the number and calls has bounced, and the page did its job perfectly.

It matters on pages meant to lead somewhere, such as an article that should lead to a service. There, most visitors leaving after one page means the next step is missing or invisible.

Compare pages of the same kind with each other, not with one ideal figure.

Where the visitors came from

Add a secondary dimension to the report, such as the default channel grouping or source and medium, to see how visitors reached each landing page.

A page reached mostly from search must answer the search and introduce the business at once. One reached from your newsletter can assume the reader knows you.

The new Search Console, still in beta, lists pages in its Performance report too, alongside the searches that led to each. Together the two show what visitors wanted and where they landed.

Pages the report cannot see

Analytics counts only pages that carry its tracking code. A PDF price list or brochure that ranks in search sends visitors straight to the file, and those visits never appear in the report.

A PDF answering a common search may greet a good many strangers with no menu, no contact details and no way back. A web page built from the same content does the job properly.

The counter-case

On a site of a dozen pages, the report may only confirm what you expected: most visits begin on the home page or the contact page.

A business working almost entirely by referral may find visitors arrive already knowing who it is, so the introduction matters less.

And some landing pages will always be odd, ranking for something unrelated to the business. Those can be left alone.

For everyone else, find the ten pages that greet the most visitors and make each one stand on its own.

This month

1. Open the landing pages report for six months.
2. Sort by sessions and list the top ten.
3. Open each one on a phone, as a stranger.
4. Say who you are and what you do.
5. Add a next step that fits the page.
6. Put contact details on the page itself.
7. Look for PDFs that rank in search.

Step three is where the problems show. Reading your own page as a stranger would, on the device most visitors use, reveals at once what it assumes the visitor already knows.

How the same pages perform on phones and on computers is covered in mobile and desktop visitors who behave differently.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.