The differences between the Navigation Summary and Entrance Paths reports

There seems to be some uncertainty about how the Navigation Summary and Entrance Paths reports differ from each other in the data they represent. It’s actually quite straightforward: The Navigation Summary report shows you 1. Whether the page you’re analyzing is a popular landing page and how many visitors it manages to keep on your site and 2. Whether the page in question is a secondary conversion page that can be optimized to improve conversions. The Entrance Path report is intended to show you which pages are viewed after visitors enter your site on a particular landing page.

Working in tandem, a combination of these reports forms a good basis for landing page analysis in answering these questions, amongst others:

• How many visitors exit my site from my landing pages (bounce rate) and how many visit other pages, starting from the landing page?
• How important are my landing pages for my site’s conversion paths?
• Which pages are viewed after having entered my site on particular landing pages?
• Am I targeting the right keywords with my landing pages and do visitors think my landing page content is relevant to their search query?

Navigation Summary

The Navigation Summary gives you a snapshot view through which of your site’s pages your visitors got to a particular page and which pages they visited after that particular page. In essence, this report can show you a couple of things:

• Whether the page in question is a popular landing page (or “entrance page”) and whether it does it’s job in keeping visitors or whether the exit/bounce rate is high. If that’s the case you might want to look at where your visitors came from and adjust the content on the page in question to provide visitors with the information they seem to be looking for. That should help improve the stickiness of that landing page and maintain more of the visitors that visit your site
• How important the page in question is for your conversions. It could be that you’re looking at a page which isn’t part of the main path of conversion but nevertheless plays an important part in converting visitors to, for example, purchases or registrations. An example:

The first set of pages is your hypothetical main conversion path, whereas the second one shows a page of secondary importance (‘Product detail’) which is a good candidate for analysis with the Navigation Summary report. It could be that the Product detail page is not elaborate enough, or that your shopping cart isn’t as easily accessible as on your main conversion path pages. The Navigation Summary will show you if this secondary page forms a bottleneck in your conversions

Entrance Paths

The Entrance Paths reports shows you how well your landing (entrance) pages perform in guiding visitors to other pages on your site (and ultimately to conversion goals). The report gives you two levels of depth, meaning for each landing page you can view the next two steps. Once the landing page you’d like to analyze is selected a list of pages visited after the landing page shows up. By selecting pages in this list you can see what the second steps were for each “first step” page and analyze how these next steps contributed to visitors reaching your conversion goals and can help you optimize the flow of visitors towards those goals.