Barry Levine says, “Talk for more than a few minutes to content publishers, and they’ll often bemoan the fact that few visitors reach their sites through the home page any more.

The real action, they’ll say, is from “side door” visits directly to a specific story, via a link shared by social media, texting, email, or from a topic-centered search. This “death of the home page” wave became an accepted wisdom after mid-2014, when a leaked chart from The New York Times showed the steep plunge in that iconic newspaper’s home page visitors.

But volume alone is only the tip of the story, according to Tom Wilde, general manager for the Americas at personalization provider Cxense.

Based on recent data from the web sites of his company’s clients, Wilde told me that the “home page is dead” approach misses a key point.

While only “five to 10 percent of users on a typical site come through a home page,” he said, “they represent about 50 percent of page views.”

In fourth quarter of last year, he said, visitors who came to the sites through a social link viewed an average of 1.8 pages per session, and visitors via a search engine result saw three pages for each session. But visitors who entered the sites through the home page viewed between 10 and 30 pages per session”.

The death of the home page has been greatly exaggerated

Marketing Land

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