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How to check Landing Page in GA4
July 20, 2025
Let’s be honest, getting traffic to your website is only half the battle.
If you don’t know which pages are successfully drawing people in, you’re essentially flying blind.
You know some of your content is working, but which bits? And more importantly, why?
This is where the Google Analytics 4 landing page report comes in.
It’s one of the most valuable, yet often underused, reports in GA4.
Getting to grips with it is the key to understanding that first digital handshake between a new user and your brand.
This guide will walk you through finding the report, understanding its metrics, and using it to make smarter marketing decisions.
We’ll also tackle the ultimate annoyance: how to fix the “(not set)” landing page issue for good.
Table of Contents
Why review Landing Page data
Before we dive into the “how,” let’s quickly cover the “why.” What strategic value does this report actually offer?
Here’s the thing, your landing page data gives you a much clearer picture of what happens in those crucial first moments of a user’s visit. It helps you to:
Identify Your Star Players: Pinpoint the exact pages that introduce the most people to your website. Once you know what works, you can replicate that success across other content.
Monitor Marketing Campaign Impact: Are people clicking through from your latest email campaign or LinkedIn ads? This report shows you precisely which pages they’re arriving on, helping you understand if your messaging and CTAs are hitting the mark.
Determine What Makes People Stick Around: By looking at metrics like engagement and key events, you can figure out which pages successfully nudge people to convert or explore further, and which ones need more work.
How does GA4 define landing page?
In the official documentation, a landing page is defined as:
“the first page a visitor sees when they arrive on your website. A landing page can be any page on your website (such as your homepage, product pages, sign-up forms, blog posts, or any other page) where users initially land.”
Finding the Landing Page Report
Right, let’s get into the nitty-gritty. Most of the time, you can find the report by navigating to Reports > Engagement > Landing page.
Simple.
However, if you can’t see it there, don’t panic. It just means it’s either been removed from your main view or wasn’t included by default. Anyone with ‘Editor’ level access (or above) can easily add it back into the left-hand navigation from the ‘Library’.
Once you’ve opened the report, you’ll see a table with the landing page path as the primary dimension, alongside several key metrics:
Sessions: The number of times a user started a new session from that page.
Average engagement time per session: How long, on average, the page held a user’s attention.
Key events: The number of conversion actions that were completed.
Active users & New users: How many distinct users landed on that page.
This gives you an immediate, top-level view of your most effective entry points.
How to Dig Deeper: Filtering for Actionable Insights
The real magic happens when you start segmenting the data.
1. Isolate a Section of Your Site
Let’s say you only want to see how your blog content is performing. You can use the filter bar at the top of the report:
Click ‘Add filter’.
Set the dimension to Landing page + query string.
Set the match type to contains.
Enter
/blog/.
The report will now only show you landing pages that live within the /blog/ subdirectory of your site. It’s a brilliantly simple way to cut through the noise.
2. Add a Secondary Dimension
Now for the really good stuff. To understand where your users are coming from when they hit a specific page, you can add a secondary dimension.
Click the blue ‘+’ icon next to the ‘Landing page’ column header.
Search for and select Session source / medium.
The table will now show you the landing page and the source of the traffic (e.g., google / organic, linkedin.com / referral). This is invaluable for judging campaign performance.
(Not Set) Landing Page
Ah, the dreaded “(not set)” value.
Seeing this in your landing page report is frustrating because it tells you nothing. It basically means a session started, but GA4 didn’t register a pageview.
So, how does that happen? There are a few common culprits.
Scenario 1: The Session Timed Out
This is the most frequent cause. By default, a session in GA4 expires after 30 minutes of inactivity. Imagine this:
A visitor opens a page on your site.
They get distracted and leave the tab open for over 30 minutes.
The GA4 session expires behind the scenes.
The user returns to the tab (which is still open) and clicks a link or closes it.
This triggers a new session, but because a page didn’t load, there’s no pageview event, and therefore, no landing page.
The Fix: You can adjust the session timeout duration. Google allows you to push it up to 7 hours and 55 minutes.
Navigate to Admin > Data Streams.
Select your web data stream.
Click Configure tag settings > Show all > Adjust session timeout.
Increase the duration.
Important Caveat: Be aware that doing this will likely decrease your overall session count, as fewer new sessions will be initiated. It’s a good idea to add an annotation in GA4 on the day you make this change to remind your team of the potential data shift.
Scenario 2: The Session Crossed Midnight
If a user starts a session at 11:55 PM and continues past midnight, GA4 treats it as two separate sessions. The landing page is correctly attributed to the first session (before midnight), but the new session starting at 12:00 AM doesn’t have a new pageview, resulting in a “(not set)” value.
Scenario 3: Technical Tagging Issues
Less common, but still possible, are issues with your Google Tag Manager setup. If an event is fired without a page_location parameter, or if you have misconfigured tags sending data without an accompanying pageview, you can also end up with “(not set)” landing pages.
What’s the difference between landing page and page location?
Look similar right?
They are both dimensions but there are important distinctions.
Landing page is the page with which a user arrives at the site.
Page location is a dimension which is the full URL of any page (this includes hostname, query string etc).
A page location could also be a landing page, but not all page locations are landing pages.
Landing Page as a metric?
Sort of.
There’s a metric called entrances that shows how many times the first event happened on a particular event.
So, it shows how many times a particular page was an entrance, in other words, the first page.
Combine that with another metric called exits (which is the page a last event occured) and you got yourself an idea of a page that drives a lot of entrances, and a lot of exits.
Great to see if there’s a campaign, driving traffic to a page, that is instantly turning people off, like someone talking politics at a dinner party.
What’s Next?
Mastering the landing page report is a fundamental skill for any data-driven marketer.
It’s your window into the user’s first experience with your brand.
By regularly checking it, filtering it, and understanding its quirks, you can stop guessing and start making informed decisions that genuinely improve your website’s performance.
Perhaps, you can use a path exploration report to see where users are landing on the site and where they go from there.
Now, go and see what your data is telling you!
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
Q1: What is a landing page in GA4?
A: In Google Analytics 4, the landing page is the very first page a user views when they start a new session on your website. It’s considered the entry point for their visit.
Q2: How do I find my top landing pages in Google Analytics 4?
A: You can find your top landing pages by going to the ‘Reports’ section, then clicking on ‘Engagement’, and finally selecting the ‘Landing page’ report. The table is automatically sorted to show the pages with the most sessions first.
Q3: Why does my GA4 report show ‘(not set)’ for landing pages?
A: The most common reason is a session timeout. If a user leaves a page open for more than 30 minutes and then returns, a new session starts without a pageview, leading to a ‘(not set)’ value. Other causes include sessions that cross midnight or technical issues with event tracking tags.
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Author
Hello, I'm Kyle Rushton McGregor!
I’m an experienced GA4 Specialist with a demonstrated history of working with Google Tag Manager and Looker Studio. I’m an international speaker who has trained 1000s of people on all things analytics.