What percent of your site visitors start on your home page?

[MichaelCorfman]

Most successful affiliates garner traffic from search engines to a wide variety of pages within their sites. The simplistic model that visitors start on the home page, and move around from there, is usually just plain wrong. One way to tell how wrong for a site is to look at the percentage visits that start on your home page.

This is pretty easy to find out using Google Analytics if you use it to monitor your site. Under "Behavior" in the left navigation, choose "Site Content" and then choose "All Pages." That will show you various attributes including 1) Pageviews, 2) Unique Pageview, 3) Average Time on Page, 4) Entrances, 5) Bounce Rate, 6) % Exit and 7) Page Value for each page on your site.

Under "Entrances" the number of times the page was the entrance page for a visit to your site is displayed followed by the percentage of visits that started on the page. In the column header the total number of visits is shown.

For the GPWA website the information displayed for the homepage of the site for a recent time period was 5,522 entrances, representing 7.39% of the 74,739 visits to the site.

I looked at a few other sites I'm involved with, and this is what I saw:

5.56% - www.casinocitytimes.com
7.30% - online.casinocity.com
9.61% - www.igamingaffiliateprograms.com
9.82% - www.casinocity.com
12.87% - www.gamingmeets.com
40.74% - www.casinocitypress.com

Knowing these numbers helps keep the importance of the home page in perspective. For most sites the home page is the single most important page. But still, it is generally more important to focus on the visitor experience for those arriving on all of the other pages of your site as well.

Vote in the poll based on your main site. But please share numbers for some of your other sites as well.

Michael

[-Shay-]

Funny you post this, as many affiliate managers seem to (wrongfully) think that if they do not have a premium home page position, they do not have "enough" "prime" exposure.

I have a very specific site that has over 93% of the visitors land on the homepage first (in this case, the AM's would be correct).

However, the site we're most often approached about (our "stated/perceived" main site), we're talking around 16% of all first visitors start out on the home page. In this case, I can think of several other pages that I'd deem "prime real estate" relative to the homepage.

[MichaelCorfman]

Funny you post this, as many affiliate managers seem to (wrongfully) think that if they do not have a premium home page position, they do not have "enough" "prime" exposure.

Yes, we've observed the same biased strong preference for home page positioning that is not well grounded in what produces the best results on our sites. I've long felt that preference is based on most affiliate managers not appreciating that sites whose traffic is based on SEO are not generally centered around the home page.

When I look at the Google analytics statistics for the online.casinocity.com website, the home page does indeed have the most entrances of any page (around 7.3% of all entrances as noted above). But even though it has the most entrances, it is not the most popular page on the site. There are almost thee times as many visits to our search results page as entrance page views of our home page. Many more visitors use the search function on the site than visit the home page.

Michael

[Planet Mark]

Great question - I also have a lower % landing on my homepage for my biggest site at least... 14% there, maybe another 12% for category main pages on top.

The challenge is to let users who land on individual articles know that you have a rich / deep site - especially with so many thinner sites around. I'm always experimenting with this, though have not quite cracked it yet.

Mark

[F-L-C]

So true! AM's never ask what is the best position on your site, they always just assume its the homepage

[sweetbet]

Only 17% of my visitors access my main site through the home page. I've never actually looked at those stats before. Very interesting. I also have to agree with some of the guys here too. So many times in the past I've received special revshare offers from AMs who ask for prime home page positions in exchange for a higher revshare commission. Then a few weeks later, I'll get an email asking why the number of player signups haven't significantly increased.

[kristal_cm]

Only 17% of my visitors access my main site through the home page. I've never actually looked at those stats before. Very interesting. I also have to agree with some of the guys here too. So many times in the past I've received special revshare offers from AMs who ask for prime home page positions in exchange for a higher revshare commission. Then a few weeks later, I'll get an email asking why the number of player signups haven't significantly increased.

Hmm interesting, this is true because as an AM myself we always want HP exposure however, technically, no matter which page the visitor lands on, would they not be directed to the page where the casino's are listed? Could be the homepage or a secondary page where all the casinos are listed. If a casino is listed on the homepage then it will surely be listed again in the other list.

[baldidiot]

Varies massively for me - a quick scan of the stats suggests a range of between 2% and 60%. As you would expect it's the smaller EM sites that have the higher percentages, whilst the bigger sites (regardless of if they're an EM or not) are lower.

Average is probably around 15% (if I had to make a quick guess).

[casinobonusguy]

Only 9.22% of our visitors land on our homepage(on CBG) , we have over 24% of our traffic going to our mobile version these days and two inside pages that are stronger than the homepage.

[sweetbet]

Hmm interesting, this is true because as an AM myself we always want HP exposure however, technically, no matter which page the visitor lands on, would they not be directed to the page where the casino's are listed? Could be the homepage or a secondary page where all the casinos are listed. If a casino is listed on the homepage then it will surely be listed again in the other list.

I guess that it depends on what the visitor was looking for. A lot of my traffic comes from bookmarks to free casino games. The visitor has bookmarked a free games section and will access it every other day or so and go from game to game. Others might be after specific information about a game or a casino, and will go straight to that inner page via a google search, get the info they want and then exit the site.

[louie.wilson]

Interesting one indeed.
I also tend to ask Home Page, but mostly because most of the time it's where the affiliate can actually give a premium spot.
However, we usually ask "what's the best position", and i must say, most of the time, the answer is "home page" as well...
These stats tend to prove that either it's not true, or some affiliates do not actually have complete overview of there top pages.

Although, one thing, page with most traffic may not be the "best spot" in terms of conversion.
I guess the question when asked should be more detailed: what's your top page in terms of traffic, what's your top position in terms of conversion

[wettFORM.AT]

this is a very interesting question and while I was looking through my stats I got some good ideas for optimization so thank you for this .. the percentage depends on how much articles I write for a specific date. If I post 10 articles for the weekend then of course the most visits comes from these pages. I have a lot of content that is only valid for some days. (betting tipps) currently the rate of the visitors that visit my page on the homepage is high but I am currently updating the page with some more static text to increase the percentage for specific keywords and subpages.

[iGamingWriter]

Hmmm, I'm not sure that the affiliate manager's conventional wisdom is all that wrong.

I have nearly 1000 different pages that have been landing pages in the last month, so I'd say my long tail exposure is fairly strong with somewhere close to 50% of pages (not including the forum) serving as the landing page for 1 or more visitors. That said, a bit short of 1 in 5 visitors land on the homepage.

I do accept that my site is perhaps unusual in that the casinos that get homepage exposure also get exposure on just about every other page, but putting that to the side, your homepage sits at the top of the link juice pyramid. If a venue gets placement on the homepage, they're far more likely to get a link to their review from the homepage. This in turn pumps up the rankings for that page which is going to be more specifically targeted to keywords that are likely to convert for them. So while the homepage itself will normally see a sizeable portion of the overall traffic, it also has a knock on effect elsewhere on site.

I'd also suspect that while big sites see a nice spread in traffic across pages, smaller sites - of which there are far more - are likely to see a more homepage heavy demographic making it positive to pursue homepage placement in the majority of conversations. If that was to be the case it would seem wise to consider each site independently before deciding on priorities.