What is Bounce Rate and Exit Rate? Bounce rate and Exit rate are vital parameters of your website, helping you track its performance. If you have not met these terms and some obvious questions pop up in your mind like bounce rate and exit rate? What is the difference between bounce rate and exit rate? And how to reduce bounce rate, then this blog is just for you. I will describe these terms and will make you understand them thoroughly.
What is Bounce Rate? There are few Just like the name suggests, a bounce happens when a user enters your website and leaves from it without visiting anything else on the site. So, the more the bounces, the higher your Bounce Rate will be, i.e. the percentage of single-page sessions. For example, if the homepage of your website receives 1000 views in a span of a month, and 500 of those views leave the website after just viewing the homepage without proceeding to any other pages in the website, then the homepage’s Bounce Rate would be calculated by Google Analytics as 50%.
There are many ways that a user bounces, for example: By closing the browser window By typing another URL in the address bar By clicking the back button Etc.
You will notice varied Bounce Rates for each of your page types. Your transition pages, just like your home page or your main services page are all setup in a manner to help guide the user towards other content on your website. And as a rule, you should see a lower Bounce Rate for these pages. In Google Analytics you can check the average Bounce Rate in the Audience > Overview report.
What is Exit Rate? An Exit Rate is the calculated percentage of users who click away to a different site from a particular page, after having visited any number of pages on your site. For example let’s assume that Ajay logs in and enters your site, from there he goes to a specific page, then to another and another and then leaves. So now this last page from Ajay’s journey is considered the Exit page, and it will contribute in determining the Exit Rate. Typically Exit Rates vary widely based on your page type. You would have noticed that a page that lists out your phone numbers, contact information, etc. is very often the last page of your website and that’s the page a user will visit before exiting. Having a high Exit Rate on your conversion pages is usually not a bad thing. Concern however should be raised when you notice similar pages with widely varying Exit Rate percentages, or you notice a significant change in the Exit Rate percentages over a period of time.
Till now you have understood Bounce rate and Exit rate. Let’s learn the key difference between bounce rate and exit rate.
For a detailed visual guide on bounce rate and exit rate and to know the important factors which affect these rates, you can check our comprehensive guide “What is Bounce rate and Exit rate?” In this you will learn about the best practices which you must follow to reduce the bounce and exit rate.
Bounce Rate vs Exit Rate Typically speaking, Bounce Rate and Exit Rate are both used as proxies for website engagement, however there are a few subtle differences between them.
Bounce Rate refers to the 1 page a user enters and Exit Rate to the last page the user visits before he/she leaves.
Bounces are always one-page visits whereas Exits can be more than one-page visits.
As users might be coming to a particular page from elsewhere on the site, before exiting, therefore a high Exit Rate doesn’t mean a high Bounce rate.
However a low Exit Rate may mean a low Bounce Rate as the user might be going on to other pages on the site before leaving
Bounce Rate is a negative for most websites, which points that the landing page is not relevant to your users.
Exit Rate on the other hand can be either positive or negative. A user may be driven to an online user publication to read a specific article or page, and they find the page they need, read the article and then leave. This is not necessarily a negative thing.
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The key difference between the two is that, the Exit Rate measures the percentage of viewers who exited a certain page, but it does not say anything about whether that was the only page that the user visited or not. Therefore, All Bounces are Exits……But Not All Exits are Bounces. Trust me it’s not as complicated as it looks.
Let’s make it easier to understand with an example, let’s say if a 100 people land on your website’s homepage and 50 of them leave without visiting any other page. Then in this case the Bounce Rate of your homepage is 50%. However if the homepage receives 400 page views over the same period of time, and out of that only 100 of those leave the site from the homepage, then in this case the Exit Rate would be 25%.
How to Reduce Bounce Rate and Exit Rate. Update your Content – Update your content regularly Don’t use Pop-ups – Avoid Pop-ups Short paragraphs – Use shorter paragraphs to increase the readability Users are impatient to get the answer for their query. They on an average don’t like to waste too much time reading long paragraphs. As such it’s important to write concisely and in short sentences. links – Add new links, reduce the broken ones. Loading Speed – It is a crucial factor for higher bounce and exit rates. Improve your page loding .I hope you by reading this blog you get a fair understanding of Bounce and Exit rate, in order to learn the key factors which can affect these rates and simple ways which can reduce bounce and exit rate to give your website a traffic boost, check our latest blog on “What is Bounce Rate and Exit Rate?”.