Bounce rate and Top exit pages
I often get questions on how and for what certain terminology is used in Google Analytics. Some terms used tend to be confusing – not necessarily on their own, but when used in context with other reports. Examples are the bounce rate metric and top exit pages report, and more particularly how Google Analytics defines the two.
Bounce rate
The bounce rate is a percentage value that represents the amount of visitors that exited the site from the same page they landed on (one-page visits). So when visitors enter your site and leave without navigating to another page, that’s quite literally a “bounce”. So how can this value be of significance to your reports?
Retailer websites, for example, will want to reduce the bounce rate, thereby improving the amount of visitors that stay on the site (increasing visitor retention) and hopefully improving conversions. Imagine the following scenario: You sell apples. A visitor searches for ‘apples’ on a search engine, clicks on your site in the SERPs but the first thing they see is an image of a pear. These people are likely to “bounce” and it’ll be up to you to figure out what makes (targeted) visitors not stick around on your site (images of pears, for obvious reasons). Bit of a silly example perhaps, but you’d be amazed with some of the mistakes made by online retailers.
The differences between the Navigation Summary and Entrance Paths reports
There seems to be some uncertainty about how the Navigation Summary and Entrance Paths reports differ from each other in the data they represent. It’s actually quite straightforward: The Navigation Summary report shows you 1. Whether the page you’re analyzing is a popular landing page and how many visitors it manages to keep on your site and 2. Whether the page in question is a secondary conversion page that can be optimized to improve conversions. The Entrance Path report is intended to show you which pages are viewed after visitors enter your site on a particular landing page.
Working in tandem, a combination of these reports forms a good basis for landing page analysis in answering these questions, amongst others:
- How many visitors exit my site from my landing pages (bounce rate) and how many visit other pages, starting from the landing page?
- How important are my landing pages for my site’s conversion paths?
- Which pages are viewed after having entered my site on particular landing pages?
- Am I targeting the right keywords with my landing pages and do visitors think my landing page content is relevant to their search query?
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