Exit rate

What is the exit rate?

As the name suggests, the exit rate describes the ratio of those who visit a URL (i.e., individual pages such as www.my-shop.com/directory/page/) to those who leave the website and thus your domain from there.

In contrast to the so-called bounces (bounce rates), a further page of the same domain precedes the page view. The bounce rate describes page visits that leave the page immediately after being viewed without further interaction.

Examples of the different terms:

1. Someone searches for a term using the search engine, clicks on your URL, and then immediately returns to the search engine. This is a bounce.
2. Someone is searching for a term again via the search engine, clicks on your URL, navigates through internal links to another URL, and only leaves the page through the second URL. This is considered an exit.

In the second example, there was an interaction with the website: the user clicks a link on URL #1 and reaches URL #2. The fact that the person leaves the website only after this action is, in contrast to a bounce, an exit. Confusing? – Yes, perhaps a little. But since it represents a significant difference in online marketing, you should definitely keep these two definitions in mind.

Calculation of the Exit Rate

In online marketing, the following formula generally applies to relate exits to sessions.

Exits / Sessions * 100 = Exit Rate

• Case 1: Visit URL #3, then exit
• Case 2: Visit URL #2, then switch to URL #1, then switch to URL #2, then exit
• Case 3: Visit URL #1, then switch to URL #2, then exit
• Case 4: Visit URL #3, then switch to URL #1, then exit
• Case 5: Visit URL #3, then switch to URL #2, then exit

Results in the following exit rates:

• URL #1: 25% – URL #1 is the exit page only in case 4 (so one out of four). Corresponds to a quarter, so 25%
• URL #2: 75% – URL #2 is the exit page in cases 2, 3 & 5
• URL #3: 0% – URL #3 is not an exit page in any of the cases (since case 1 is an abandonment and is not counted)

Case 1 is a bounce, therefore this case is not included in the calculation. This means that only four cases are considered.

Why is the exit rate relevant for online marketing?

As case study 2 shows, the URL does not seem to have the same quality as the other pages, as more users leave the page directly from here.

Considering that a significant portion of website visitors come to the domain through paid advertising, this could mean that URL #2 is causing money to be “thrown out the window.” Provided that the page in question is not one intended for exiting. For example, the last page of an order and payment process, the order confirmation page, could indeed have high exit rates because users have successfully completed the purchase.

Examples and evaluations:

• Assumption: The page to be analyzed is the search results page of the shop search
  • If the drop-off rates on this page are quite high, then the quality of the search results should be examined more closely. It may be because users are dropping off primarily because the searches yield no results.
  • Optimization approach 1: include more products in the range that correspond to the searches.
  • Optimization approach 2: Various other articles can be displayed here. Discounted and reduced offers; products that enjoy very high popularity in their own shop (based on searches or sales)
• Assumption: The exit page is a product detail page
  • Here, a deeper analysis would be necessary:
    • Is it only about this one product?
    • Aren’t the exits particularly high not only here but on all product pages?
  • Possible hypotheses for the dropouts could be:
    • Pricing for this one product
    • No satisfactory cross-selling here or with any products
    • The product page does not provide sufficient additional links to offers, other categories, the internal search, etc.
  • Ultimately, the usability expert should also be involved here. There are initially no limits to the possibilities for this behavior.

Of course, there are many more possible cases, but the examples hopefully illustrate the importance of the exit rate for online marketing purposes. If, for example, the last assumption is correct, then more “money is thrown out the window” in online marketing, especially in paid channels like SEA, display, and the like. The entire investment yields nothing because it does not lead to sales, in other words, to conversions.

What is a good exit rate?

We are asked this repeatedly. And as the previous section hopefully makes clear, it is impossible to give a blanket answer to this question.

And yet we know that there are always statements that, in our opinion, only confuse. A good exit rate would naturally approach zero, which is unlikely to apply to a URL or an entire domain. Because eventually, even the most successful website/domain/shop visit comes to an end.

But if you manage a single website, such as an online shop, you quickly get a good feel for achievable low and alarmingly high exit rates. Here it is especially important to have enough data. Because if you take a URL as an example that has two visits and two exits, then this is not a valid basis for hypotheses, even if the exit rate is alarmingly high.

So a tip in conclusion: Take URLs from your website that have higher traffic and examine the exits there more closely. And then it’s all about: Optimize, Test, Optimize, keep Testing …

Do you want to improve your exit rate and need support? Then contact us! Do you want to learn more or have your team trained on this topic? Then check out our Analytics seminars.