Exit rate

What is the exit rate?

As the name suggests, the exit rate describes the ratio of those who visit a URL (that is, an individual page 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 is accessed prior to the page view. The bounce rate describes page visits that leave the page immediately after viewing without further interaction.

Examples of the different terms:

1. Someone searches for a term on 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 site via the second URL. This is referred to as an exit.

In the second example, there was an interaction with the website: the user clicks a link on URL #1 and arrives at URL #2. The fact that the person only leaves the website after this action is, in contrast to a bounce, an exit. Confusing? – Yes, perhaps a little. However, as 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 (that is one out of four). This 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 (as 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 for online marketing relevant?

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

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

Examples and evaluations:

• Assumption: The page to be analysed is the search results page of the shop search
  • If the exits on this page are quite high, then the quality of the search results should be examined more closely. It may be that users are exiting primarily because the searches are not yielding any results.
  • Optimisation approach 1: include additional products in the range that correspond to the searches.
  • Optimisation approach 2: Various other articles can be displayed here. Discounted and reduced offers; products that enjoy great popularity in one’s 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 this one product?
    • Aren’t the exits particularly high not only here but on all product pages?
  • Possible hypotheses for the drop-offs 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 expert in usability should also be consulted here. There are initially no limits to the possibilities for this behaviour.

Of course, there are many more possible cases, but the examples hopefully illustrate the importance of the exit rate for online marketing purposes. For instance, if the last assumption holds true, then in online marketing, particularly in paid channels such as SEA, display, and the like, more “money is thrown out of the window”. 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 often asked this. And as the previous section hopefully makes clear, it is impossible to give a blanket answer to this question.

Yet we know, of course, that there are always statements that we believe only cause confusion. A good exit rate would naturally approach zero, which is unlikely to apply to either a URL or an entire domain. Because at some point, even the most successful website/domain/shop visit comes to an end.

However, especially when managing a single website such as an online shop, one quickly gets a good sense of achievable low and alarmingly high exit rates. Here it is particularly important to have sufficient data. Because if you take a URL as an example that has two visits and two exits, this is not a valid basis for hypotheses, even if the exit rate is alarmingly high.

So a tip to conclude: Take URLs from your website that have higher traffic and examine the exits there more closely. And then it’s a matter of: Optimise, Test, Optimise, Test further …

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 take a look at our Analytics seminars.