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 bounce rate is not always an accurate metric however, in the way that it is measured by Google Analytics. Whereas under normal circumstances a “bounce” is something you’d like to prevent from happening, in some instances an action such as an ad click (which is generally a positive thing for ad driven sites) Google Analytics will interpet this action as a “bounce”, since the visitor exited the site through the ad click. So if your site hosts numerous ads on its pages, and you know for a fact your visitors are clicking on those ads, the bounce rate metric will be of little value of you - certainly not a KPI.

Top exit pages

The top exit pages report displays very straightforward information: Which of my site’s pages are the last page my visitors see and how many of the visitors that see a particular page exit the site from that page?

Although the information contained in this report is quite straightforward when compared to the bounce rate, there are a couple of pitfalls you should be aware of when trying to interpret the data.

By looking at the bounce rate you make a distinction between two groups of visitors: Those that leave the side immediately upon entry and those that click through to at least one other page. The top exit pages report shows you the number of exits (not so interesting) and the % exit. That last metric is tricky - it encompasses both the “bouncing” visitors as well as those that left later on (irrespective of whether they saw all your site’s pages or just two). So if you have a high overall bounce rate (80-90%) this report may be of little use to you. But don’t worry - with that kind of bounce rate you have your work cut out for you elsewhere and top exit rates should be the last thing on your mind at this point.

Another important note to make is that some sites will have pages for which it is natural to have a high exit rate. An example is a thank you page after a registration - This is often the point at which visitors will have done what they wanted to do on your site and exit. On the other hand, if you try to cross-sell other products on this thank you page (Amazon does this, for example: “Others who bought this product also bought…”) you WILL want to keep a close watch on its exit rate.

Got a question? Let me know!