Not everyone comes through your front door. A landing page is the first page a visitor encounters on your website, how that visitor enters your site. We typically expect this to be the home page, and most often it is. Why?

• It's the shortest address for someone to remember and type in.
• It's the address we advertise.
• It's typically where other sites link to on your site.
• It's where your visitors expect to find the latest news.

There are also unique landing pages created for advertising campaigns, the ones with that short and un-linked URL as discussed earlier.

But there's more you can learn from your top landing pages. Using Google Analytics, go to the Content section, then view your Top Landing Pages. Using the Advanced Segment drop down at the top of the page, check the boxes for All Visitors, Returning Visitors and Search Traffic. It will now display not only the total number (All Visitors), but also the proportion of visitors who were returning to your site. If they are repeat visitors returning to a particular page, they may have that page bookmarked. (Remember, we're looking at the first page a person sees on your site in unique visitor sessions, not how many times a visitor looked at that page in one session.) We don't know for sure how they arrived at this page, but we know it is important enough for them to know how to get to this page directly. What does that tell you about these pages? Perhaps you should pull the most current news/content from the top landing pages and include it on your home page.

Now analyze the search traffic segment. This should correlate with your top search phrases as mentioned earlier. Again, this identifies what people are looking for, and what they expect to find the most interest of on your site.

You'll also notice a column about Bounce Rates. A "bounce" is defined as a single page visit. For your returning visitors who went directly to this page, a high bounce rate isn't uncommon. They came to this page because they knew that was where the information they wanted was located. They found it, they left. It's disappointing they didn't spend more time on the site, but not entirely unexpected. Search engine traffic tells us more. If someone is using a search engine, they may not be familiar with your site. If they landed on a page and then left your site without looking around at other pages, this is where you'll want to focus some effort. You want visitors to explore your site if they are unfamiliar with you, so look at the top landing pages by search traffic, and if they have a high bounce rate, add elements to those pages that cause your visitors to explore further. Add cross-marketing features ("people who were interested in this item also found these useful"), coupons, promotions, and obvious links to related pages. You may need to improve your navigation links on these pages: are they difficult to see?