What Is Bounce Rate & Exit Rate of Website?

Bounce rate is a very important metric for website owners. It basically tells you what percentage of your visitors are “bouncing” away after landing on your site (e.g., they just visit one page and leave before clicking on to a second page inside your site). A bounce can occur for several reasons, including:

• The visitor hit the “Back” button on his browser.
• The visitor closed his browser.
• The visitor clicked on one of your ads.
• The visitor clicked on one of your external links.
• The visitor used the search box on his browser.
• The visitor typed a new URL on his browser.

All the actions above would cause the visitor to leave your site. Provided he did any of these actions right after arriving at your site (and before clicking on to a second page), it would be counted as a bounce. In fact the formula for finding the bounce rate on your website is:

Bounce rate = Visits that left after one page / Total number of visits

For example, if during a certain month your site received 120,000 visits, out of which 80,000 bounced after visiting just one page, your bounce rate for that month would be 80,000 divided by 120,000, which equals to 0.66 (or 66%). Notice that you can calculate the bounce rate of your whole website or of single pages inside it.

Obviously the lower the bounce rate on your website, the better, because it means that visitors are getting engaged by your content and design, and that they are clicking to visit a second (third and so on) page on your site.

How do you know the exact bounce rate on your site? A web analytics program like Google Analytics will automatically track the numbers for you.

Exit Rate:
Exit rate is the percentage of people who left your site from that page. Exits may have viewed more than one page in a session. That means they may not have landed on that page, but simply found their way to it through site navigation.

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%