Difference between bounce rate & exit rate (Google Analytics)

First, definitions of bounce and exit rates.

 

BOUNCE Rate is the percentage of visitors that hit your website on a given page and don’t visit any other pages on your site.

EXIT Rate is the percentage of visitors that leave your site from a given page based on the number of visits to that page.

 

Bounce Rate for a page

* Bounce Rate is the percentage of visitors who exit your site from the landing page itself without navigating any further.

*A “Bounce” is a single-page visit to your website. Bounces are always one page sessions.

For example, visitor lands on your homepage and leaves your site without visiting any other pages on your website – that’s a “Bounce”.

 

Exit Rate for a page

* Exit Rate the percentage of visitors exiting or leaving your site from a particular page on your site.

* Exit rate is calculated for every page separately because it is the property of an individual page independent of any other page on the site.

 

Calculations of Bounce and Exit rates

* Bounce Rate is calculated by taking the total number of Bounces (to your website or a set of pages, depending on what you’re looking at), and dividing it by the total number of Visits (to your website or a set of pages, depending on what you’re looking at).

* Exit Percentage is calculated by taking the total number of Exits, and dividing them by the total number of Pageviews (Not Visits – Pageviews)

 

Some notes

Percentage of Exits happened from this page / this set of pages”, without separating visits that Bounced from visits that did not Bounce. It’s impossible to draw any conclusions or formulate any hypotheses from this, as you can from the Bounce Rate metric.

Keep in mind that, a visitor to your website ultimately has to leave your website.

So, I would recommend for you to pay close attention to your Bounce Rate.

 

Examples

1. Bounce rate = 100%, Exit rate = 25% for a page. How is it possible?

Imagine you have 600 visits to the page.
Group 1 – 100 visits are from google search engine, that means this page is a landing page in this case.
Group 2 – 500 visits from visitors who visited this page after visiting other pages of your site.
These two groups are totally different groups of visitors.

Then, all 100 visitors form the first group exited your site after visiting the page. So bounce rate is 100%.
But only 50 visitors from the second group (500 visits) exited your site from this page.
Doing some math, we get exit rate = (100+50) / 600 * 100% = 25%.

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