The five doors 13 min live
Analytics calls a session's first screen its landing screen, and counts entrances per screen. Group Mango Lane's landing screens and five doors appear. Each door gets two numbers: its share of the 360,000 sessions, and its reach-PDP rate - the share of its sessions that go on to view at least one product. Share is how wide the door is; reach-PDP is how good it is.
LiveThe canon table - two numbers per door5 min▶
| Door | Sessions | Share | Reach-PDP | PDP sessions produced |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Home | 180,000 | 50% | 20% | 36,000 |
| PDP-direct (ads, push, links) | 54,000 | 15% | 100% | 54,000 |
| PLP category | 54,000 | 15% | 50% | 27,000 |
| Search landing | 36,000 | 10% | 75% | 27,000 |
| Other (account, orders, support) | 36,000 | 10% | 0% | 0 |
Read the surprises, not the totals. Home carries half the traffic but delivers only a quarter of the PDP sessions (36,000 of 144,000). The PDP-direct door, a third of Home's width, out-delivers it. And the "Other" door - a tenth of your store - delivers nothing by design, which is exactly why a1 told you to keep service sessions out of shopping conversion.
Self-studyWhere these numbers come from2 min read▶
Nothing exotic: GA4 defines the landing page as the first page of a session and counts entrances - sessions whose first event happened on that screen. Your analysts group landing screens into these five buckets and divide. The analyst track computes it end to end in b2; your job is to insist the five-door summary exists and stays on one page.
Manufactured doors 12 min live
Home, PLP, and search are organic doors - shoppers open them. The PDP-direct door is different: nearly all of it is manufactured by your own teams. An ad click, a shared link, a push notification deep-linking straight to one product. It is the only door whose width AND quality you control directly - which is why it deserves its own scrutiny.
LiveWhat the vendor data says - flags attached5 min▶
Most published numbers on push and deeplinks come from the vendors who sell them, so treat them as directional, not gospel:
- Airship (vendor data, 681 billion pushes analyzed): rich image pushes lift direct opens by about 56%, and users who receive pushes retain at roughly 3x the rate over 90 days versus those who receive none.
- CleverTap (vendor data): average push click-through sits around 2.74% - a useful sanity bar when someone pitches you double digits.
- Two metric names worth knowing: a direct open (the user tapped the push) versus an influenced open (the user opened the app soon after receiving one). Vendors love blending them; always ask which one a headline number counts.
- And one honest gap: there is no credible public benchmark for "deeplinked sessions convert Nx better than organic". Anyone quoting one is quoting a guess. Measure your own PDP-direct door instead - you have it, in the table above.
LiveLanding screen quality - the door is only as good as the match4 min▶
The PDP-direct door reads 100% reach-PDP by definition - the session starts on a product. That makes its quality metric different: not "did they reach a product" but did the landing product match the promise that brought them. An ad for a linen dress that deep-links to a sold-out size, a generic homepage redirect, or last season's price turns your best door into your most expensive bounce. Ad-to-page match is a merchandising discipline, not an analytics one - but it shows up in analytics as a high-traffic, low-conversion PDP-direct door.
Mix vs quality 10 min live
When entry numbers move, exactly two things can have happened: the mix changed (more sessions arriving through a weaker or stronger door) or a door's quality changed (the same door delivering more or fewer of its sessions to a product). The metrics course taught you the mix-effect trap on averages; this is the same lesson wearing a door costume. A blended "sessions to PDP" rate can fall while every single door improves - if the mix shifted toward Home.
LiveThe two-question drill4 min▶
Any time someone reports an entry or traffic change, run the questions in order:
- Question 1 - mix: did the door shares shift? (A campaign, a season, an app-store feature can move millions of sessions between doors in a week.)
- Question 2 - quality: holding each door alone, did its reach-PDP rate move? (A homepage redesign, a broken search, a stale deeplink.)
Mix problems belong to marketing and channel owners; quality problems belong to product and merchandising. Asking the two questions in order routes the fix to the right team before the meeting ends.
Self-studyWho sent them - three scopes of "source", in plain words3 min read▶
Each door also carries a "who sent them" label, and GA4 records it at three scopes. Leaders do not need the mechanics - just which question each scope answers, so you can catch reports mixing them:
- First-user source: where this person came from on their first-ever visit, fixed forever. Answers "which channel finds us NEW customers?"
- Session source: where this particular session came from, assigned fresh each time. Answers "which channel drove THIS month's traffic?"
- Event source: which channel gets credit for a conversion under an attribution model. Answers "which channel gets credit for the ORDER?" - the deep end of that pool is its own course, learn-marketing-attribution-with-phoebe.
The classic boardroom bug: a new-customer question answered with session-scoped numbers. Same channel, three different shares - ask which scope before you compare two decks.
Three door incidents ★ 10 min · read-along
Three months, three headlines from Mango Lane's trading reviews. Each one resolves with the mix-or-quality drill and one leader question.
LiveIncident 1 · sessions up 10%, orders flat3 min▶
The headline. A paid re-engagement push added 36,000 sessions. Traffic up 10%, celebration email drafted - but orders did not move.
The drill. Mix question first: which door did the new sessions enter through? Answer: the campaign deep-linked lapsed users to their account screen "to reactivate" - straight through the Other door, the 0% reach-PDP door.
The read. Pure mix move: no door got worse, the store just bought width on its weakest door. The leader question: "Before we buy traffic, which door does it land on, and what is that door's quality?"
LiveIncident 2 · Home's quality quietly slips3 min▶
The headline. Home entries reaching a PDP fell from 20% to 16% - a fifth of the biggest door's quality, gone. Traffic and door mix: unchanged.
The drill. Mix is clean, so it is a quality move on one door. What changed on Home this month? A full-bleed brand-campaign takeover banner - beautiful, unclickable-to-product, and it pushed the category tiles below the fold.
The read. At 180,000 entries, four points of reach-PDP is 7,200 lost PDP sessions a month. The leader question: "Every homepage change ships with a before-and-after on Home's reach-PDP rate - where is it?"
LiveIncident 3 · the influencer spike3 min▶
The headline. An influencer post sends the PDP-direct door to double its usual width for a week. Great news - probably.
The drill. Mix move, into your BEST door - but Part 2's rule applies: PDP-direct quality is the ad-to-page match. Does the landing PDP have the featured colorway in stock? Is the price the one in the video? Is the size guide one tap away for a first-time visitor?
The read. A stock-out on the landing PDP turns the spike into 25,000 disappointed first impressions. The leader question: "When an external spike hits one product page, who gets paged to check stock, price, and page health that same day?"
Try it yourself - this week ◐ 15 min total
- Ask your team for your own five doors: landing screens grouped into Home / product-direct / category / search / service, with sessions and share for each.
- Ask for one quality number per door - the share of each door's sessions that reach a product page. Ten numbers, one page.
- Circle the widest door and the deepest door. Are they the same? At Mango Lane they are opposites - check whether yours rhyme.
- Ask who owns each door's quality. Write a name next to all five; a blank next to any door is your first finding.
Sources this session draws on
The door mechanics are platform documentation; the push numbers are vendor data and flagged as such:
Three questions before you go 🎯 ◐ 90 seconds
1 · Home carries 50% of sessions; PDP-direct carries 15%. Which delivers more PDP sessions, and why?
Width times quality is what lands on the product page. The narrow deep door out-delivers the wide shallow one - which is why every door needs both numbers, not just traffic.
2 · Sessions rose 10% but orders stayed flat. First question to ask?
Run the drill in order: mix first, then quality. In the demo incident, a paid push poured 36,000 sessions through the 0% reach-PDP service door - no door got worse, the mix just got heavier on the weakest one.
3 · A vendor deck claims "push drove 40% more app opens". What should you ask first?
The two metrics differ hugely and vendors blend them. Same discipline as source scopes: before comparing numbers, ask what exactly was counted.