Even if you don’t consider yourself a technical person, you need to know how to use Google Analytics. It’s simply one of the best free ways to get an overview of your web presence and how your site is performing overall. If you’re able to look at your Google Analytics and understand exactly what is being said, you’re ahead of the game. To help you with that, today we want to address one of the most often confused elements of the digital marketing Analytics package: Exit Rate Vs Bounce Rate.
Bounce rate and exit rate are both great metrics for determining the success of a site. Unfortunately, a surprisingly large amount of people don’t seem to realize that their is a difference between the two. Let’s take a look at what those differences are:
Bounce Rate
Bounce rate measures people leaving after viewing a single page. They don’t click through or engage in any meaningful way, they simply hit the site and then leave again, hence the word ‘bounce.’ For instance, if 50 people visit a landing page you’ve built, and then 30 navigate away immediately, that gives us a bounce rate of 60%. What constitutes a good bounce rate is different depending on the industry and the purpose of the particular landing page, but obviously, the lower the better.
Exit Rate
Exit rate measures how people exit your site, no matter how many pages they have visited. They may have viewed multiple pages in the session, and they may not have originally landed on the page they are exiting from. A good exit rate is also variable, but it’s an especially useful metric when you have paginated content. If everyone is exiting your site from page 3 of your 5 page article, you know that that’s where you’re losing them, and you need to fix page 3.
In Conclusion
Remember that bounce rate refers to just the landing page in question, while exit rate included all traffic for every visit where the main page plays a part. To put it another way, bounce rate is the immediate impression and exit rate is when they call it quits.