Bounce Rate versus Exit Rate

24 Jun, 2010 —by Halide

Both, bounce rate and exit rate are important data and can help us to get insights from our web analytics. Let’s have a deeper look at these two important metrics, what they tell us in detail and why they are important.

Definitions on Bounce Rate and Exit Rate:

What does the Bounce Rate data tell us? Bounce rate is the percentage of visits in which the person left your site from the entrance page. This metric is often used to measure visit quality - a high bounce rate generally indicates that site entrance pages aren’t relevant to your visitors. Bounce Rate is extremely important for determining if you have failed with your website or not. You can analyze the failure on three levels:

1. Top Landing Pages
2. Top Referrers
3. Top Search Keywords

What Exit Rate measures is simple: How many people left your website from a certain page. Sounds similar to Bounce Rate, doesn’t it? But it is different indeed. The visitor who exits might have visited other pages on your site, but just exited on that specific page. In my opinion, Exit Rate is more important for determining which page in a process isn’t performing up to expectations. For example visitors are exiting the site on a web page that clearly is a entrance to a more important page, then you should probably take a deeper look at that page’s content. Are the calls to action not compelling enough? Does the page provide content which is not interesting for visitors? Is there a technical issue with the page? Does it take too long to load?

Bouncing and exiting is an interesting topic in web marketing. Well, at least analyzing Bounce Rate and Exit Rate can help you understand visitor expectations, which can lead to higher conversion rates.

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