The difference between Landing Pages and Top Content Pages

It’s been a while since I’ve written a “The difference between…” post, but since this blog has received a lot of brand new subscribers over the past few days (welcome everyone!), I felt like one of my traditional blog posts would be in order. Oh, and tell everyone you know to subscribe to our Site Intelligence / Web Analytics blog – thanks, I appreciate it

I’ve written the following “The difference between…” blog posts so far:

• The difference between Bounce Rate and Exit Percentage
• Why are my visits different from my clicks?
• Why are Conversions in Google AdWords different than Goals in GA?

The difference between Landing Pages and Top Content or Most Viewed Pages is actually a very easy difference to understand, but I have seen that quite a number of folks sometimes get the two confused or mixed up, so let’s clear the air, shall we?

The Top Content / Top Pages / Most Viewed Pages type of report
Whether you’re using Omniture SiteCatalyst, Google Analytics, or anything in between, a report like this is simply attempting to show you visits and pageviews to the many different pages on your website. They may show you the bounce rate of each page, but they are usually very simple reports by default, designed to give you a sense of how popular your website’s pages are. It doesn’t take into consideration where they came from or if they’ve been there before – again, its main objective is to collect visits, pageviews, and time on site metrics (and depending on your analytics package, bounce rate as well).

Top Landing Pages / Top Entry Pages type of report
This report is designed with one metric in mind – the bounce rate that we analysts love so very much. This report is specifically designed to show you what pages were used by your visitors as entry pages to your website, and what each page’s bounce rate is. In Google Analytics, this is a very simple but very effective and strong report – if you see a popular page on your website with a very high bounce rate, you may want to investigate as to why so many people are landing and leaving right away (or, without visiting any other page on your site).

Pretty simple, right? Whenever you see “Entry Page” or “Landing Page” as the name of your report, just know that this isn’t counting every page of your website – only pages that were used as entrance pages.

…and, in case you were wondering what the heck I’m talking about when I say “bounce rate”, check out my post on it from some months ago, and you’ll be all caught up!

Thank you for reading – and again, welcome all new subscribers!