Please don't leave!

You spent a lot of time creating a website that you thought was great! Unfortunately, everyone is leaving before they turn into conversions, what's wrong?

If a lot of people are quickly leaving your webpage, you may have a page exit rate. "The page’s exit rate indicates how often visitors exit from it after visiting any number of pages on the site; as a percentage, exit rate is calculated as the number of exits / number of page views for a particular page." (Page, 2021) This means someone went to your website, looked. around a bit, and then left to a different page. There could be multiple reasons why this occurred and we will get into them but it is important to recognize the number of exits and look at if it is due to a problem you can fix, or you just simply didn't have what they were looking for. 

A page exit should not be confused with a bounce. A bounce is a "single-page session on your site page." (Google, 2020). Which is when someone bounces from say your homepage to your menu. They stay on your site but bounce from page to page looking for what they need. 

People could be exiting your page for multiple reasons: 

• a link/ button is broken and won't let them continue

• they are overwhelmed or confused by the content on the page

• they were not interested in what they were seeing

• distracting popups

• what they were looking for was too hard to find, etc.

The first step in limiting your exit rate is by identifying the problem. You can do this by looking at your data, seeing what page everyone is leaving from, and analyzing why they are doing so. Heat maps can show the most problematic sections on the pages most exited. (Page, 2021) You can also run surveys asking those who left why.  Once you know what happened, you can work to create a solution. You may need to get your web team involved to fix bugs, your content team to fix the copy/visuals, or your advertising team to help better understand what your audience is looking for.

Have you run into a problem that caused a high exit rate? 

Tell us what happened in the comments!

Resources:

Google. (2020). Bounce rate - analytics help. Google Analytics Help. https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1009409?hl=en.

Page, R. (2021, May 22). Exit rate in google analytics [vs bounces]: GA definition. Hotjar. https://www.hotjar.com/google-analytics/glossary/exits/.

Vasile, A. (2019, March 4). Bounce rate vs exit rate - a simple visual explanation. Canonicalized. https://canonicalized.com/bounce-rate-vs-exit-rate/.