Exit Rate vs Bounce Rate – Web Analytics Metric Mystery
The terminology used in Web Analytics tools has always been haunting because every tool has it’s own meaning and context for a term. Two of such terms are Exit Rate and Bounce Rate which are mixed with each other often. Let’s see why.
Google Analytics’s blunder with Exit Rate
Out of all the metrics Exit Rate and Bounce Rate are often confused with each other whereas the two are discrete and therefore, should never be mixed. Although, both of them are used to gauge efficiency of a web page, yet they are different.
Google Analytics too, has messed up with Exit Rate and reports it in a similar way as the Bounce Rate and that is where the confusion grows from. Google Analytics actually shows a “site wide average” of Exit Rate if you go to Top Content report, which is a blunder. How can a site have an average exit rate? more on this after the following explanation…
What is Exit Rate?
It is the percentage of visitors exiting or leaving your site from a particular page on your site. Exit rate is calculated for every page separately because it is the property of an individual page independent of any other page on the site.
Now the most haunting question with Exit Rate is, Percentage of which type of visitors? Because ‘visitors’ in the above definition can have two meanings and it leads to two different interpretation of Exit Rate.
1. When ‘visitors’ means the number of visitors on a page then the exit rate indicates the efficiency of that page. If a page has a high exit rate then you should cross check whether it should have an Exit Rate that high. For instance, your home page should have a minimal exit rate and all your “thankyou” pages or internal pages should have a higher exit rate. So, if a page has a high exit rate then there could be a problem with the content, usability, navigation etc.
2. When ‘visitors’ means the total number of visitors on the site then the exit rate indicates the percentage of your site’s total visitors who left your from a particular page. This will help you recognize exit points or leakage of your website. In such a scenario exit rate of all the pages combined should add up to 100%, because it has to be as 100% of your visitors will leave/exit your site. Some pages will have a higher exit rate than others. In an ideal scenario, a “thank you for buying from us” page will have a higher exit rate than the “welcome to our site” page (home page in other words).
What is Bounce Rate?
It is the percentage of visitors who exit your site from the landing page itself without navigating any further. High bounce rate on a page means that it is highly inefficient in appealing visitors to use your site.
Bounce Rate of all your web pages combined gives a “site-wide average bounce rate” which indicates the overall efficiency of your website (all webpages collectively).
… Google’s blunder continued
Exit Rate cannot be averaged on a site-wide scale; it can only be summed up to 100% because all your visitors will exit your site.
Google Analytics compares the number of exits from a page with the number of visits on that page to determine the Exit Rate of that page, which is fine but they don’t need to give a site avg. for this metric.
Top Exit Pages
Top Content
Now, is it not a major blunder on Google Analytics? If your view for the above differs, do let me know!
The curry is still Hot!
No related posts.
Comments
21 Responses to “Exit Rate vs Bounce Rate – Web Analytics Metric Mystery”
Feel free to leave a comment...
and oh, if you want a pic to show with your comment, go get a gravatar!
Hi…
Though personaly i never got an opportunity to try Google’s web analytics but found the terminology description and the difference between the two very insightful.
Rgds
hi monica,
I am glad you think so
exit rate : the exit rate indicates the percentage of your site’s total visitors who left your from a particular page (but they visit your site… that’s mean they click somethere, if they exit without doing anything it’s a bounce)
Bounce Rate: the rate of people who left your website from the landing page, that’s mean when someone click on you’re banner or pub and land on your landing page, he immediately leave you site (so no surf) it’s tell you that you’re land page is irrelevant, people expect something else when they click on your ads. so you have to modify your ads or change your landpages then people can find what they looking for.
send me a msg if you want more information about google adwords.
Hi Sujati,
Thanks for the effort, but what’s the point you wanted to make?
-
Abhishek
[...] list they now provide more details for an account like the number of visits, average time on site, bounce rate, goals completed and a dynamic field to see the percentage change in a metric over a day, week, [...]
It’s an average exit rate for the number of pages on the site, not the site total.
e.g.
My Site has 4 pages
Page1 60% exit rate
Page2 20% exit rate
Page3 10% exit rate
Page4 90% exit rate
Average exit rate = 45%, although all visits still exited
There’s nothing wrong with it as such, but it is a little pointless because, as you say, you want to monitor exits by individual page, not whole site in order to view potentially problematic pages.
Bounce is best described as the percentage of single access (or page) visits, but it does not neccessarily mean the landing page is irrelevent, especially in a time of AJAX & interactive pages as the user may be doing something on the page of value, even if it is only reading an article & then leaving.
Unfortunatly GA isn’t advanced enough to construct deeper engagement type measures which would show a more colourful picture than just Bounce or Exit rate
Hi Richard,
I agree that a site wide Exit Rate is pointless and also to your point that a high Bounce Rate does not necessarily mean irrelevant landing pages. In case of dynamic / interactive pages written in AJAX or Flash one would have to also consider the Time Spent on Page in order to finally conclude efficiency of that page.
Thanks for such an insightful comment.
-
Abhishek
Hi, thanks for an interesting post.
I personally think exit rate is a pretty meaningless metric anyway. As you mentioned in your post, everybody has to exit at some point however, taking the example of an e-commerce site, some who make a purchase will return to the home page before exiting the site. That increases the exit rate of the home page but doesn’t make it any more of a problem page.
Bounce rate is a far greater measure of a site or a page’s ability to meet expectation.
Hi Hugh,
Thanks for the comment, I’ll try to come up with more of such informative posts in the time to come.
-A
Bounce rate is a page where a visitor does not stay there for more than 10 seconds and exits to some other page.
If visitor stays for more than 10 seconds then its should not be considred a bounce page as he/she might have consumed the content of the page.
Hi Abhishek,
In regards to your previous comment, I think it’s important to remember that by definition, the Time Spent metric requires a second page in order to be calculated (difference between two time stamps). So, Time Spent on a landing page with a high bounce rate is not necessarily going to provide insight in to the value/efficiency of the page.
“In case of dynamic / interactive pages written in AJAX or Flash one would have to also consider the Time Spent on Page in order to finally conclude efficiency of that page.”
Dear B
There is a difference between Time on Page and Time on Site. What you have indicated in your comment looks like more of a way of calculating Time on Site. I am yet to confirm the Time Stamp method from GA team.
I am sure Google Analytics has better ways of calculating Time on Page and if not then you can record Interactions and Events with your AJAX page (or any page) by passing a few extra parameters to Google Analytics script on your page. That way you can also be sure of the efficiency and time spent on that page.
Funny. I was looking at the GA top content report and thought – what is the point of the summary exit rate? So Googled it, and happily found someone else that finds it pointless.
You are right – exit rate is only useful when in the context of a single page (or collection of related pages).
Whether the averaged metric is too high or too low depends on the type of site you have – if you expect your site to have a low exit rate on all pages, then your average will be low. However, if you have few pages and one or two of the pages has a really high exit (perhaps supposedly so – maybe these pages have highly insightful answers) then the average will be high – which is ok…
Find some value in this metric in trending/comparing performance of various sections of a site.
Using directory filter to set up independent profiles of key sections so can compare average exit rate of each directory and also trend over time.
Average exit rate can in this way reveal a low performing section of a site, or changes that warrant further research into cause.
Though likely more relevant in lead generation sites, page specific exit rate can be useful to identify trouble pages that are beyond the first step of a conversion path. Bounce will not show you this.
On a related note to this thread, when one attempts to analyze by referring source the time on page or time on site, Google Analytics automatically samples the data whenever the total page view count exceeds 200,000 page views.
While G/A discloses the “sampled data” right at the top of the reports, it does not provide any clue whatsoever what the actually sample rate is.
To be able to even begin to properly evaluate the time on site and or bounce rate effectively, can you confirm what the standard data “sample rate” G/A utilizes for its reporting?
Please confirm.
Thanks.
Abhishek, yes it is possible to implement custom events but out of the box Time Spent is based on timestamps.
Not sure specifically about GA but I would imagine they work in the same way as other industry leading WA tools.
Omniture:
The Time Spent on Page report shows the amount of time that a visitor spends on each page accessed during a visit. When a page loads in the visitor’s browser, the image request populates the time variable in the SiteCatalyst code with the exact time up to the second. When the visitor leaves the page and accesses another page, the new image request populates the time variable in the SiteCatalyst code on the new page. SiteCatalyst calculates the time between the two pages and populates an instance to the proper time interval in the Time Spent on Page Report.
Definition of Visit Duration from the Wab Analytics Association:
Visit Duration
Type: Count
Calculation:
The length of time in a session. Calculation is typically the timestamp of the last activity in the
session minus the timestamp of the first activity of the session.
Re:Karl Kleinbach
Dear Karl,
I agree to your point that if exit rate is used to monitor performance of key sections then it proves more useful.
That is why I said, Exit Rate should be able to help you when you’re assessing one page or a group of related pages (section or a directory).
Thanks for the insight
Re:B
Dear B,
Thanks a lot for the Sherlock Holmes stuff. Now I can finally comment on Time on Page mechanism being used by WA tools. Tim stamp is a cost effective way and more precisely a bandwidth conservative way because with this, WA tools don’t only have to sent data to their servers once i.e. on page load.
I think they should maintain a stream of time stamps for every visit to a particular page in order to calculate Time on Page accurately for bounces and exits.
I agree with your article on the fact that the terminology is confusing and that the site wide exit dat is pretty much useless.
In addition to the discussion above on the subject of Time on Page (or even Time on Site) I would like to add that there are useful articles to read who question these data because of several reasons (one of them is Tabbed Browsing), quite interesting stuff !
notable milieu. So hang on to!
I am still confused! i am clear about exit and bounce but what confuses me is the time spend by the visitor on the page. Doesn’t that pays any important role?