New on Google Analytics Landing Pages Report – Measuring Success

At some point last week Google Analytics quietly released an apparently small change to its Landing Pages report (Content tab => Site Content => Landing Pages). This report was almost useless before this change and now it joins the list of the most useful reports on the tool. In a few words the change was simple: we can now link landing pages to goals, i.e. we can see the value of each landing page out of the box.
Up till now, the landing pages report was very limited, having only three metrics available on the report:

• Entrances: the absolute number of visits landing on this page
• Bounces:the absolute number of visits that bounced when landing on this page
• Bounce Rate: the percentage of bounces from entrances in this page

This is all we got. We could not drill down into landing page performance even when it came to simple actions like understanding time on page (for non-bounces), not to mention goal conversion and ecommerce transactions that were completed during a visit that was initiated on this page (there were some work arounds, but they required many clicks). As of this week we see the following on the same report:

As we can see in the screenshot above, we now have other metrics available in this report, such as Pages/Visit, Avg. Time on Site and % New Visits. This would already be a great improvement, as it allows us to instantly see engagement metrics for visits started from a specific landing page. However, if we look at the top of the pages, we see that, besides site usage, we can now view this report by goals and ecommerce. This means that we can now have an instant picture of landing page performance from this report.
This knowledge is very important in order to understand where to focus the optimization efforts. Once the landing pages can be analyzed, we are more free to segment landing pages, in a way that each audience receives the most matching landing page.