Entries is a metric which represents the number of times a value is the first in a visit. It most commonly refers to the entry page i.e. the first page a user saw in their visit.
Entry Rate is a metric which tells us, of all the visits to a page, the percentage where it was the first page viewed in the visit. The calculation is;
[Entries / Visits]
For example, if the Homepage was visited 150 times, and in 30 of these visits it was the first page viewed, it would have 30 entries and (30/150) = 20% entry rate. This tells you that in 20% of visits to the homepage, it was the first page viewed.
Entry rate is used in the Pages report. It can either be used to show entry rate for a specific page or to rank all pages by entry rate. It tells us the pages where a high proportion of traffic land directly from an an external source, and so should be optimised to keep customers engaged, on the site and able to progress their journey.
If a page has a high entry rate it usually means that customers are being directed to it from an external source such as a link in an email or a search engine result.
If a page has a low entry rate it tells you that customers are navigating to it internally from other areas of the website.
Entry Rate: Weighted
Consider the below scenario;
Last week Page A had 5 visits and 4 entries, resulting in 80% entry rate
Last week Page B has 3,000 visits and 1,500 entries, resulting in 50% entry rate.
Which page should be prioritised for optimisation?
If ranking by entry rate, Page A would appear very high on the list, while Page B would be much lower down. However, only 4 customers entered on Page A whereas 1,500 customers entered on Page B.
Therefore, as changes to Page B would impact a much greater volume of customers, it should take priority over Page A.
But on a website with tens of thousands of pages, how do you identify the biggest opportunities? This is where Entry Rate: Weighted comes in useful. As well as looking at the entry rate of a page, it also takes into consideration the proportion of total site traffic that page accounts for, meaning that as in the example above, pages with lower entry rate but much higher traffic will be ranked above high entry but low traffic pages. The calculation is;
[Entries / Visits] x [Visits / Total Visits]
If total visits was equal to 10,000, then in the example above Page A would have
[4/5] x [5/10,000] = 0.4% Entry Rate: Weighted
While Page B would have
[1,500/3,000] x [3,000/10,000] = 15% Entry Rate: Weighted
Therefore in a ranked report Page B would rank above Page A, and the most important pages to focus on would be at the top of the list.
