The Difference Between Exit Rate and Bounce Rate

Exit rate and bounce rate are two metrics that sound very similar, but in reality are very different. They can both be used to gauge how well you are doing in terms of content quality and user behavior. Here’s what each of these means.

Bounce Rate

Your bounce rate is the number of people who leave your website without visiting any other page. Since it is measured on a page level, you can see your bounce rate from any particular page. A high bounce rate on a page generally means users aren’t satisfied in some way. It could be that the content isn’t good enough or that your navigation structure is confusing. It could be any number of things.

The bounce rate won’t tell you exactly what to fix, but it does give you a good idea of whether a page is working or not. Generally a bounce rate of 55 percent or higher is considered quite bad. If it is over 50 percent, that means over half of your visitors are simply leaving your site. On the other hand, anything 35 percent or lower is considered stellar.

Exit Rate

Your exit rate is the number of people who leave your website from that particular page. A high exit rate doesn’t necessarily mean users aren’t satisfied. For example, if you have a step-by-step guide, it is only natural that users will leave your site at the last page of your guide.

Your exit rate can be used to compare the effectiveness of different kinds of pages. If one content page has a drastically different exit rate than another page, you might have to seriously look at the higher exit rate page.

Some Examples

Just to clearly illustrate the difference between bounce rate and exit rate, here are a few examples.

Example 1: A user comes to your website and leaves without clicking a link. That counts as both an exit and a bounce from that page.

Example 2: Someone came to this page from another page on your site, then leaves your website. This counts as an exit, but not a bounce.

Example 3: Someone comes to this page from another page on your website, then goes to another page on your website. This is neither a bounce nor an exit. It will count as an exit from the page they leave from.

As you can tell, though these two metrics are related, they aren’t the same thing. The bounce rate can be used to identify weak pages, while the exit rate needs to be treated a little more carefully. When using exit rate as a metric, make sure to determine why a page’s exit rate is low or high, rather than just looking at the number.

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Author: jm

Joan Mullally has been doing business online for more than 20 years and is a pioneer in the fields of online publishing, marketing, and ecommerce. She is the author of more than 200 guides and courses designed to help beginner and intermediate marketers make the most of the opportunities the Internet offers for running a successful business. A student and later teacher trainee of Frank McCourt’s, she has always appreciated the power of the word, and has used her knowledge for successful SEO and PPC campaigns, and powerful marketing copy. One computer science class at NYU was enough to spark her fascination with all things digital. In her spare time, she works with adult literacy, animal fostering and rescue, and teaching computer skills to women.