How To Use Exit Rate To Discover Quick Wins

Exit rate is an often-ignored source of conversion rate improvement. Often overshadowed by bounce rate, it’ll tell you the performance of your inner pages, which is often where the conversion decision is made. Ignore exit rate and you’re only looking at your conversion process from afar.

Exit Rate v Bounce Rate Explained

Exit rate and bounce rate are often confused with one another and it’s usually the latter that gets all the headlines. Bounce rate is commonly regarded as the main early indicator of conversion potential, an approach which we fully agree with. However, what we’ve come to realise as an Adwords management agency is that most people don’t really know the difference between bounce rate and exit rate and, therefore, are missing out on an important part of the optimisation process.

So let’s clear up any confusion. Bounce rate is the percentage of people who land on a page and leave without registering any further pageviews or events (eg watching a video or any other event that you have manually configured). Exit rate is the percentage of people who view a given page and leave the site at that page.

The key difference to observe here is that bounce rate only applies to people who have landed on the page in question. When you land on a page, you either bounce or you do something else on that site. So exit rate and bounce rate may often correlate as they are both different ways of measuring the rate of people that leave the site, except bounce rate only measures those who have landed on that page and done anything else.

When To Use Bounce Rate

Bounce rate is great for measuring:

1. The quality of your traffic

2. The quality of your landing pages

It’s a fantastic early measure that is likely to translate to conversions and sales later on. A high bounce rate and you’ve got problems, a low one and you can be pretty confident you’re on the right track.

Use Exit Rate To Find Low Hanging Fruit

You should be using exit rate as a key measure of success for your inner pages. If, like most websites, the conversion doesn’t take place on the landing page, then exit rate is every bit as important as bounce rate. If bounce rate is the percentage of people who don’t want to navigate deeper into your site after first seeing it, then exit rate will tell you what happens when they do decided to probe deeper.

Exit rate is how you find the low hanging fruit.

If you’ve got a great bounce rate but a terrible exit rate on your key secondary page, then that tells you you’re getting good traffic in with a good message but your inner page is letting you down. In other words, you’ve got a great opportunity to improve your overall conversion rate by working on this page.

Final Thought

The best way to look at your inner page performance is through goal funnel visualisations but exit rate is a great way of measuring overall page performance. So many advertisers look at the bounce rates of their pages as key measure of success but some pages aren’t designed to be landed on, making bounce rate irrelevant. Try analysing exit rate on your inner pages and you might just discover some quick wins.