Exit Page Stats & Bounce Rates

Exit Page Stats & Bounce Rates are easily one of the most widely overlooked important metric by webmasters today.

Why are they so important? Well these stats will point to holes in your webpage. By holes we mean weaknesses, or problems.

Closer Look @ Exit Pages

Wikipedia defines Exit as "the third-person singular present active indicative of go out". So we can easily deduce from the term "Exit Page Stats" that these are pages where persons exit.
If you can find your most exited pages, the pages on your site that have made people say.. ehh i no longer want to use this site, then you can keep the user on your site longer. This means more sales, page views, branding, and maybe even more bookmarks and referrals.

So now that we know what an exit page is, and why they are bad, the next step is finding them and fixing them.

How do I find exit pages?

The most widely used analytics software is Google Analytics. Its on millions of sites worldwide, and best of all its free. Head over to google.com/analytics/ sign up for an account and then place the small piece of code in the body of your page right before the </body> tag. So at the very end of your page. Putting it at the bottom of your page ensures that it won't slow down your page loads. Now we wait. If your site doesn't get much traffic then you may need to wait a week or month, if on the other hand its very popular then you may only have to wait a few hours or days.

To see the Top Exit Pages you need to go into the google analytics account for that webpage. On the left hand side click the "content" link then the "Top Exit Pages" link below that. You can see an example in the picture we've included in this page.

You will now be able to see the most exited pages, along with the percentage of people that have exited from that page.

It is very important to take a close look at these pages. What is making them leave? Have a friend look at the page and see what they think.

A great trick to use in lowering that exit percentage is to put links to other related pages on your site on the bottom of that page or article. Most people get done reading and then they say ok what should I do now. Give them some options, and they just may hang around a little bit longer.

Where are you going?

A few very common reasons that people leave.

Pop Up Ads
Bad Color Design
Poor Content
Spelling Errors
Way to Many Ads
No Images, Just Text
Browser Issues (design for Mozilla and IE)

What's the deal with Bounce Rates?

Bounce rates a very very important to web design and management. Wikipedia defines bounce rate as "A term used in web site traffic analysis. It essentially represents the percentage of initial visitors to a site who "bounce" away to a different site, rather than continue on to other pages within the same site."

So essentially the visitors come to your site either, by a link from another site, a search engine, or advertisement. They then say...hey that's not what I wanted and leave.

So why are they bouncing? Here are some basic reasons.

The page was not what they where looking for
The advertisement leading to the page is not very accurate
The link leading to the page is not very accurate
They found what they wanted on that page and then decided to leave

You can also look at the common reasons people leave above. It has other good points that could be applied to this.

Some people who are into seo say that bounce rates effect your ranking. I tend to agree. If google sends you traffic for a certain term, and 5 seconds later that same user ip is searching for that term again. Its a good indication to them that your page didn't have what that person was looking for.

What's the Ideal Bounce Rate

There is no "ideal" bounce rate, but I would consider anything under 50% to be good, and anything under 30% to be great. If its in the 70s to 100% range you need to work on that page a little.