What an entrance measures
An entrance is counted when a session begins on a particular page. Every session has exactly one, so the page credited is the first one the visitor loaded — from a search result, an ad, a shared link, an email or a bookmark.
Entrances sit on the pages report next to views, and the pair is more useful than either alone. Views count every time a page loaded, including the times somebody arrived elsewhere and clicked through. Entrances count only the arrivals. A page with many views and few entrances is somewhere people go once they are already inside the site; a page whose entrances are close to its views is a doorway.
Why entrances matter
They tell you which pages the outside world actually opens, and that is rarely the set of pages you designed as entry points. An old blog post, a service page linked from a forum, a location page picked up by Maps — these often take more arrivals than the homepage, and they are the ones that need to explain plainly who you are and what to do next.
Entrances also make behaviour metrics readable. Engagement, bounce and conversion figures for a page mean something when the visit started there; mixing arrivals with pass-through traffic blurs both numbers and hides which pages are letting people down.
Where entrances go wrong
The commonest confusion is between an entrance and a landing page. They describe the same event from opposite sides: the landing page dimension names the page, the entrances metric counts the sessions that started there. Reading them as two independent sources of truth leads to double counting.
Technical detail distorts them too. Query strings, campaign parameters and hash fragments can split one page into several rows unless the reporting strips them, and a session that times out while somebody is still reading will start a fresh session — and a fresh entrance — on whatever page they happen to have open.
How to act on it
Sort your pages by entrances and read the top of that list as your real front door. Then open each of those pages on a phone and ask whether it says what the business is, who it is for, and what to do next, without scrolling. In Nepal most arrivals are on mobile data, so the first screen is doing nearly all the work of the site.
Where a page takes plenty of entrances but offers no obvious next step, add one — a relevant service link, a way to make contact, a related article — rather than redesigning a homepage that few people entered through. Check the wording of the search snippet or ad that brought them, too, since an entrance page that disappoints usually promised something slightly different. Reviewing entrance pages this way is one of the cheapest pieces of conversion rate optimisation available to a small business.