Landing Page vs Pages and Screens: GA4

With so many preexisting dimensions in Google Analytics 4 – to say nothing of custom dimensions – telling them apart can be difficult.

Especially when they are similarly named.

Here’s a question caused by one of the more common mixups:

What’s the difference between ‘landing pages’ and ‘pages and screens’ in Google Analytics 4?

To answer this, I’ll tell you what a dimension is, then define “landing pages” and “pages and screens,” respectively, in more detail.

What is a Dimension in GA4?

Here’s Google’s definition:

A dimension is an attribute of your data. It describes your data and it’s usually text as opposed to numbers. An example of a dimension is Event name, which shows the name of an event that someone triggers on your website or application (such as “click”)

When Google says “it’s usually text as opposed to numbers,” it’s not talking about dimension names. Even metrics have words for names.

Rather, it’s talking about the value of the dimension.

Two such values are “landing page” and “pages and screens.”

Landing Page Definition in Google Analytics 4

The landing page is the first “page” a user lands on when they visit your site to initiate a new session.

While the homepage is the most common landing page for the majority of websites, any page on your site that has GA4 tracking could be a user’s landing page.

If they “land” on a page other than your homepage, it’s very unlikely they’re navigating to a specific URL within their browser. An exception might be a small percentage of users who bookmark special sections, like election coverage or product pages.

Otherwise, if someone lands on a specific news article, for example, they likely found it from a channel like organic search, social media, email or a direct message.

Tip: Each Google Analytics 4 session can only have ONE landing page. By definition, it’s impossible to have multiple landing pages in the same session.

Pages and Screens Definition in Google Analytics 4

Pages and screens are actually two different things within the same dimension.

Pages are the individual “pages” – i.e. unique URLs – users can visit on your website. Pages apply only to websites.

Screens, on the other hand, are the individual “screens” users can access within your app, and only your app.

Suffice to say, if you don’t have an app, you will never have any “screen” activity in your GA4 dashboard.

So if you don’t have an app and the pages and screens dimension tells you that a particular piece of content has 1,000 views within the chosen timeframe, you know that all 1,000 views are actually pages.

(The inverse is true if you only have an app and not a website.)

The same page or screen – whether be refreshing or by going to another page/screen and returning – can be counted for multiple views within the same session.

Tip: There’s no theoretical limit to the number of pages and/or screens a user can access within a particular session.

Key Difference Between Landing Pages vs Pages and Screens

Now that we understand the respective definitions of these two dimensions, we can more easily distinguish them.

Landing pages are where users begin their session on your website.

Pages and screens are ALL the unique pieces of content (whether homepage, sections, product pages, blog posts or otherwise) that a user visits during a session on your site.

All landing page data will be included within pages and screens data, but not all pages and screens data will be included within landing page data.

I hope this clarifies for you the difference between these two dimensions. If you have any questions, please let me know in the comments.