Breakdown Entry page from Page Url (prop) shows unexpected result

[Hyeran]

Hi there, I'm a bit confused about the concept of entries and the entry page. T-T 

I thought 3,398 would be the number that entries of the 'register' page URL. (I used prop value) 

However, when I tried to drop down to the entry page, it showed other pages which are not the page URL that I used. 

plz, let me know if anyone knows why it happened. 

Thanks 

[yuhuisg · Accepted solution]

See if you have a "Entry Page URL (c26)" dimension instead. If so, use that.

In AA, Pages is not synonymous with Page URL. In particular, from the "(c26)" postfix, I can tell that your page URLs are being tracked to a custom variable, "prop26". So that is an implementation that is not out-of-the-box from AA. Pages are normally tracked with the "pageName" variable.

Now, when you breakdown your Page URL (c26) variable by Entry Page, you have to consider a user journey through your site. It could be something like this:

(enter site) homepage --> page B --> page C --> register --> page X --> page Y

In the screenshot of your report table, you're reporting the page URL of that "register" page. But in this visit, "homepage" was the entry page, i.e. the first page that the user viewed in this visit. As a result, AA is reports that "homepage" was an entry page for the page URL "register".

[Hyeran]

Thanks for the answer! that means, even though I used "entries" as the metrics, it would be not the entries of the register page? Then, what that entries represented for the page url? 

[yuhuisg]

The "Entries" metric would work, but it would make sense when paired with a non-Entry dimension.

So in your case, include the "Page URL (c26)" dimension with the "Entries" metric only. If you want to breakdown the URL by Pages, then use the "Page" dimension, not the "Entry Page" dimension.