What is a landing page?
In analytics, a landing page is the first page of a session. What that means for reporting, how it differs from the marketing sense, and its own metrics.
What is a landing page?
In analytics, a landing page is the first page a visitor sees in a session, whatever page that happens to be. In marketing, the term usually means a purpose-built page for one campaign. The analytics definition is broader and is the one your reports use: any page can be a landing page.
The formula.
Landing page metrics are per-session, attributed to the session's first pageview
- entrances
- Sessions whose first pageview was this page. Always less than or equal to the page's total pageviews.
- bounce rate
- Computed only over the sessions that entered here, which is why it is a landing-page metric.
A page can have thousands of pageviews and almost no entrances, in which case its bounce rate is computed on a tiny sample and should not be trusted.
A worked example.
One blog post, one month.
| Pageviews | 6,200 |
|---|---|
| Entrances, meaning sessions that started here | 5,410 |
| Sessions that continued to a second page | 1,190 |
| Bounce rate | (5,410 - 1,190) / 5,410 |
Bounce rate = 78%, computed over 5,410 entrances rather than 6,200 pageviews
The 790 views that were not entrances belong to visitors arriving from elsewhere on the site. They are excluded from bounce rate and included in exit rate, which is the difference between the two metrics in one line.
Two definitions, one word
The marketing definition of a landing page is a standalone page built for a specific campaign, usually with one message and one call to action and often no navigation at all.
The analytics definition is mechanical: the first page of a session. Under that definition your homepage is a landing page, so is every blog post someone found in search, and so is a documentation page linked from a forum answer.
Both are useful, but they answer different questions and confusing them produces bad conversations. When someone says the landing page is underperforming, establish which definition they mean before anyone touches a design.
Why landing pages are the right unit of analysis
Site-wide metrics average away everything interesting. Landing page is the level at which most useful decisions are actually made, because it is where intent, source and content meet.
The pairing that matters is landing page by source. The same page can convert at 6% from organic search and 0.9% from paid social, and the difference is not the page, it is what the visitor was promised before they clicked.
Sort by entrances rather than by rate. A landing page with 40 entrances and a spectacular conversion rate is noise; the pages worth an afternoon are the ones taking real volume.
See it on real data
The live demo is a fully populated dashboard with real demo traffic. No signup and no card required.
Open the live demoLanding page metrics worth reading
Entrances
How many sessions started here. This is the denominator for bounce rate and for landing-page conversion rate, and it is not the same as pageviews.
Bounce rate
Only meaningful per landing page, and only against pages with the same job. Compare blog posts to blog posts.
Conversion rate per entrance
The number that decides where to spend effort. It answers whether this entry point produces outcomes, not just readers.
Engagement time and scroll depth
The pair that separates a page people read and left satisfied from a page they abandoned. Bounce rate alone cannot tell them apart.
How Mrkr reports landing pages
Mrkr reports entrances, bounce rate, engagement time and scroll depth per landing page, and lets you break each one down by source, medium and campaign, which is where the actionable differences live.
Because campaign parameters are kept on the session, a conversion later in the visit is attributed both to the landing page that started it and to the campaign that brought it. Marketing and product reads of the same visit agree.
All of it works in the default cookieless mode, since a landing page is a property of the session rather than of a person tracked across days.
Questions, answered.
Related terms.
- What is bounce rate?
Bounce rate is the share of sessions that end without a second interaction: one page loads, nothing else is recorded, and the visitor leaves.
- What is exit rate?
Exit rate is the share of views of a given page that were the last page of the session.
- What is conversion rate?
Conversion rate is the share of visits or visitors that completed a defined goal, such as a signup, a purchase or a demo request.
- What is utm?
A UTM is a set of query parameters added to the end of a link so that analytics can tell where a click came from.
- What is session?
A session is one continuous visit to a site: a group of pageviews and events from the same visitor with no long gap between them.
Where this shows up in Mrkr
- See entry pages broken down by source in the live demo
Landing page by source is where the difference between channels becomes visible.
- Tag campaigns so landing pages can be compared by source
- Browse the full analytics glossary
Every metric, method and privacy term, defined in one place.
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