Why Google Analytics is displaying wrong landing pages?

Question

I see all of my pages as Landing Pages in Google Analytics which cannot be true as I did not post those pages anywhere and I don't see any traffic hitting directly to that page. Also, I am using virtual page views on few buttons and I see those virtual pages as Landing pages too. For example,

/click/request-a-quote 35000 views

35000 is too big a number to be ignored. Even if I ignore Virtual Pages Views, I see a lot of pages as Landing Pages that I am 100% sure that visitors ( atleast not so many users) are NOT hitting directly.

Any advice, how to debug it?

PS:

I'm using the following code:

var _gaq = _gaq || []; _gaq.push(['_setAccount', '<>']);

_gaq.push(['_setDomainName', 'none']);

_gaq.push(['setLocalGifPath', '/images/_utm.gif']);

_gaq.push(['_setAllowLinker', true]);

_gaq.push(['_trackPageview','account/phase1']);

Answer 1

Due to GA's 30 minute timeout for a session visit, any page can be a landing page. For example a user can be on a page, walk away for an hour, come back and have the page now look like a landing page. This is a known problem for which there is no real fix, although this usually applies to a few edge cases and so, is perhaps not the issue you are experiencing.

If you are locally storing your logs (which it looks like you are doing) then you should try and find the answer in there. Specifically look for the utms parameter which will state the session request number, make sure that this is 1 on all the landing pages. More generally you can drill down on the data and see if you can find this problem on a specific subset of your users, perhaps by location, IP, browser, etc.. There are many different ways to slice the data to find the root of your problem.

Answer 2

Could it be that you have a script (JavaScript or server-side header) that may be deleting/changing your Google Analytics cookie? Or all your domain cookies?