Landing Page Performance / SEO Performance

Hi @elinamirin I would definitely recommend using entry page. The metrics you mention go perfectly with entry page and will give you a clean picture of the data. 

When using page name, you should get the same results for visits and bounce rate. But time spent per visit for entry page will give you the full time spent on the visit. While time spent per visit for page will give you the time spent only on that page.

There's a few issues to address here:

1. Marketing Channels have a default attribution of 30 days... so direct visits that come after the MC is set will also be included in your numbers

2. Entry Page is the first value captured into the Page dimension during a visit, but Organic Search is not generally limited to only the first page view in a visit. And this value is persistent through the entire visit...  So using Entry Page isn't really a good candidate.

It sounds like you are specifically interested in where people are coming in from Organic Search... So at a very basic level, I would use the Page dimension, and the Marketing Channel Instance metric. This is a specific metric that is triggered when the Marketing Channel is set (but does not exist to pages where the values persist).

Example:

Visit 1 - Direct

• Page 1
  • Marketing Channel set to "direct"
  • Marketing Channel Instance triggered
  • Page = "page 1"
  • Entry Page = "page 1"
• Page 2
  • Marketing Channel persisted value "direct"
  • Marketing Channel Instance not triggered
  • Page = "page 2"
  • Entry Page = "page 1"

Visit 2 - Organic Search

• Page 3
  • Marketing Channel set to "organic search"
  • Marketing Channel Instance triggered
  • Page = "page 3"
  • Entry Page = "page 3"
• Page 4
  • Marketing Channel persisted value "organic search"
  • Marketing Channel Instance not triggered
  • Page = "page 4"
  • Entry Page = "page 3"

Visit 3 - Direct

• Page 5
  • Marketing Channel persisted value "organic search" (still within 30 day attribution)
  • Marketing Channel Instance not triggered
  • Page = "page 5"
  • Entry Page = "page 5"
• Page 6
  • Marketing Channel persisted value "organic search"
  • Marketing Channel Instance not triggered
  • Page = "page 6"
  • Entry Page = "page 5"
• (User Gets a Marketing Email and Clicks to Site from the email)
• Page 7
  • Marketing Channel set to "marketing email"
  • Marketing Channel Instance triggered
  • Page = "page 7"
  • Entry Page = "page 5"

So you can see how Marketing Channel crosses visits, and that Entry Page isn't tied specifically to different entries within the same visit.

Now, I know that you are also looking for Visits, Bounce Rate and Time Spent per Visit

Visits, depending on whether you are looking for "specific visits from the channel" vs Visits within the 30 Day attribution can change the connotation...

Bounce Rate you need to see the entire visit to determine which visits only had a single hit versus multiple...  

Time Spent per Visit also needs to see the full visit... but if you use Page as your Breakdown, you will get the time spent per page, not the entire Visit (the name is misleading as it reflects the specific dimension breakdown).

If you really just want to see the pages by "technical entry" then the Marketing Channel Instance would isolate the count of the pages that came directly from the organic search....

You might want to create a segment something like:

This should isolate Visits that had an instance of Organic Search, but it will still show other Marketing Channels if they happen in the same visit (see Visit 3 above)

 You should be able to use this in conjunction with bounces and time spent... but make sure that the table breakdown isn't going to cause calculation errors...