New On Google Analytics Pages Reports – Entrance Metric

A new metric appeared on the pages report on Google Analytics recently. The pages report provides basic information for each page viewed on websites. It shows the number of times a page was viewed, how long (in average) visitors stayed on the page, what is the Bounce Rate of the page and what percentage of visitors left the website through a specific page (direct link to report). However, since yesterday we started seeing a new column: Entrances. This metric tells us how many of the visits to a specific page were also the first page seen in the session.

Bounce Rates are calculated as visits where no request was sent to Google Analytics besides the initial request when the visitor landed on the website, i.e. it is relevant only to visits where the visitors landed on a specific page. So without knowing in how many of the sessions a page was also the landing page, analysts might overreact to Bounce Rates, giving too much emphasis to it. For more on why most people misinterpret Bounce Rates also see Yehoshua Coren post on Demystifying Bounce Rates.

According to Jordan Louis on his Web Analytics Primer: “It is important to know the bounce rate because it can help to indicate which pages are the most ‘repulsive’ to your visitors, or which repel the most visitors off of your site when viewed alone.“