Landing page

A landing page, in analytics, is simply the first page a visitor sees in a given session — the entry point, whatever it happens to be, not necessarily the homepage. This is a narrower use of the term than in marketing, where "landing page" often means a standalone page built specifically for one campaign or ad, with no site navigation, designed to convert a single type of visitor.

Analytics tools report landing pages as a dimension, showing entrances, bounce rate, and conversion by whichever page each session started on. This differs from a pageview report, which counts every view of a page regardless of position in the journey, and from exit rate, which measures where sessions end rather than where they begin.

Landing-page performance matters most where traffic is being paid for or actively earned: a mismatch between what a search result or ad promises and what the landing page delivers, failing to match search intent, is a common cause of high bounce rates and poor Quality Score in paid search. A frequent pitfall is optimizing a landing page's conversion rate using aggregate bounce rate alone without segmenting by traffic source, since a page can perform well for one channel and poorly for another at the same time.