Bounce Rate Differs From Exit Rate

Web Analytics is fun, fascinating and important to your Web success - you know it is. It's also immensely confusing for many who get interested in measuring the actions being taken on their site. Let's look at a question that's common among those new to analytics: How does bounce rate differ from exit rate?

Bounce Rate is the percentage of exits based on entrances for that individual page.
Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits, that is, visits in which a user left your site from the entrance page. The bounce rate is often considered a measure of visit quality. A high bounce rate can indicate that when a user enters a landing page it is not relevant. Bounce rate can be reduced by modifying landing pages to include keywords in the copy or providing the information or services that were promised on previous pages or within ads on external sites. Bounce Rate relates to Exit Rate.

Exit Rate is the percentage of exits based on visits to the site.
Exit Rate is the percentage of visitors that leave a site from a given page based on the number of visits to that page. Exit rate is dependent on the page itself. Home or index pages should have a low exit rate while conversion completion pages (thank you pages, for example) should have a high exit rate. This metric helps determine which pages need to be improved, as it indicates the percentage of a site's total visitors who left from a particular page. Exit rate of all the pages combined consequently should add up to 100%, because all visitors will ultimately leave.

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