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When is a Google Analytics Entrance not a Visit?


In this question, the accepted answer says that a visit is not always an entrance. I checked and it's true for my site, though the difference is small (0.4% difference).

difference between ga:entranceBounceRate and ga:visitBounceRate

When is a visit not an entrance?


Solution

  • Visits are incremented with the first hit of a session, whereas Entrances are incremented with the first Pageview hit of a session. So if the first hit of the visit is not a Pageview then you might see a difference between these two calculations.

    ga:entranceBounceRate = (ga:bounces / ga:entrances) * 100
    ga:visitBounceRate = (ga:bounces / ga:visits) * 100
    

    For example:

    • Visitor A lands on your site from a search and the first hit sent to Google Analytics is a pageview. Then they leave the site by closing the tab/browser. This would count as 1 visit and 1 entrance.
    • Visitor B lands on your site from a search and the first hit sent to Google Analytics is a pageview. They also interact with some element on the page that sends an additional hit to Google Analytics in the form of an event (e.g. they click the play button). This would count as 1 visit and 1 entrance because the first hit of the visit was a pageview. Now just say the user keeps this page open in a browser tab but doesn't do anything with the page for 1 hour, then they come back and interact with another element on the page (e.g. they hit stop button) and an event hit is sent to Google Analytics. Since 1 hour went by without any hits being sent to Google Analytics, this will be considered a new visit. And in this case the first hit of the visit was an event. So you would end up in this case with 1 visit, 0 entrances.

    So to sum the example up you'd have 3 visits and 2 entrances which would yield different results for those two calculations.