What Is an Entrance?
An entrance in web analytics refers to the first page a visitor lands on when they begin a session on your website. Every session starts somewhere, and the page that starts it is credited with one entrance. If 300 people begin their visit on your homepage today, your homepage receives 300 entrances for that date. If 80 others start their visit on a blog post about digital marketing trends, that blog post receives 80 entrances.
The distinction between entrances and page views is important. A page view is counted every time a page loads, no matter where it falls in the session. A page might receive 5,000 page views in a month but only 400 entrances, because most of those views occur during sessions that started on a different page. Entrances specifically count first touches, making them a useful measure of which pages are acting as the primary entry points to your site.
Entrance data ties closely to your traffic sources. Pages with high entrance counts from organic search are ranking well for relevant queries. Pages with high entrances from social media or paid campaigns are the landing pages those channels are sending visitors to. When you understand which pages draw the most entrances and from which sources, you can better evaluate whether those pages are delivering the right first impression and guiding visitors towards the actions you want them to take.
It is also useful to compare entrances to total page views as a ratio. A page where entrances make up 80 percent of total page views is almost always the starting point of a visitor's journey, rarely visited mid-session. A page where entrances represent only 5 percent of page views is typically reached through internal navigation rather than as an entry point. Both scenarios have implications for how you should structure and prioritise content on those pages.
Entrance In Practice
The scenario below is an illustrative example, not a Juicy Designs client result. The figures indicate the scale of effect that entrance analysis work typically produces, so treat them as indicative rather than measured.
Picture a Pretoria-based accounting firm that runs a blog covering topics like small business tax compliance, VAT registration in South Africa, and year-end financial planning. An analytics review might show that a handful of blog posts collectively account for something in the region of 60% of all entrances to the site, far outstripping the homepage. Most of those visitors would typically arrive from Google search, land on a blog post, read it, and then leave without ever visiting a services page.
Recognising this, the firm could add a contextual call to action at the bottom of each blog post that links directly to the relevant service page. For example, an article about VAT registration would include a visible prompt directing readers to the firm's "VAT and Tax Services" page. Entrances would still flow in through the blog, but the proportion of those sessions that progress to a service page could plausibly increase meaningfully over the following quarter. Understanding where sessions begin is the first step in designing a better path for visitors to follow.
What an entrance is in analytics
An entrance, in web analytics, is the event of a visitor entering a website through a particular page, that is, the page being the first one a visitor lands on in a session, so an entrance is counted when a page serves as the entry point to the site for a visit. The page through which a visitor enters is often called the entrance page or landing page (in the analytics sense of the page where the session began). Entrances differ from page views: a page view is counted every time a page is viewed (including when a visitor navigates to it from elsewhere on the site during their visit), whereas an entrance is counted only when the page is the first one in a session, the point at which the visitor entered the site. So a page might have many page views but fewer entrances, if it is often viewed after visitors have already entered elsewhere; or a page might have many entrances if visitors frequently land on it first (for example, a page ranking well in search or targeted by ads and links). Entrances are useful for understanding how visitors arrive at a site and which pages are the common entry points, revealing where people are entering from search, ads, links and other sources. Understanding entrances matters because knowing which pages visitors enter through, and how they perform as entry points, is valuable for SEO and marketing: entrance pages are where first impressions are made and where the visitor's journey begins, so identifying the main entrance pages and ensuring they perform well (engaging visitors and guiding them onward) is important, which is why the entrance metric, showing where visits begin, is a useful lens on how a site attracts and receives its visitors.
Entrances, engagement and SEO
Entrances are a useful metric for SEO and marketing because they identify the pages through which visitors actually arrive at a site, which are the pages where first impressions are formed and journeys begin, so understanding and optimising entrance pages is valuable. Entrance pages reveal where a site is attracting visitors from, since a page with many entrances is a common entry point (often because it ranks well in search, is targeted by ads or links, or is otherwise where people first arrive), so looking at which pages have the most entrances shows which content is drawing visitors in, and from which sources, which informs where the site's traffic is coming in and which pages are doing the work of attracting visitors. This matters for SEO because the entrance pages are, in effect, the landing pages for the site's incoming traffic (including organic search traffic), so their performance is important: an entrance page needs to engage the arriving visitor (matching what they were looking for, since a mismatch causes them to leave immediately), make a good first impression, and guide them onward into the site or towards a conversion, rather than being a dead end. Analysing entrance pages alongside engagement metrics (such as whether visitors stay, engage, and continue, or leave immediately) shows which entry points work well and which lose visitors, highlighting entrance pages to improve. High-entrance pages that engage and convert well are valuable assets; high-entrance pages where visitors bounce indicate a problem (a mismatch between what drew them and what the page delivers, or a poor experience) to fix. So entrances help a business focus on optimising the pages that actually receive its incoming visitors. For a South African business, using the entrance metric means identifying which pages visitors enter through (the site's real landing pages for its traffic, including from organic search), and ensuring those entrance pages perform well, engaging arriving visitors, matching their intent, making a good first impression, and guiding them onward, so that the traffic the site attracts is well-received and converted rather than lost at entry. Because entrance pages are where visits begin and first impressions are made, focusing on the main entrance pages, especially those receiving valuable search traffic, and improving how they engage and convert visitors, is a practical way to get more value from the traffic a site attracts, which is why entrances are a useful metric for understanding and improving how a site receives its visitors.
FAQ
What is the difference between entrances and page views?
A page view is counted every time a page is loaded, regardless of where it falls in a session. An entrance is counted only when that page is the first one visited in a session. A page can receive thousands of page views but far fewer entrances if users typically arrive via other pages first.
Why do entrances matter for SEO?
Entrances tell you which pages are acting as front doors to your website. Pages with high entrance counts are usually ranking well in search or receiving significant traffic from other sources. Optimising these landing pages for conversion and first impressions has an outsized impact on your overall site performance.