The Learning Center

Bounce rate and exit rate both pertain to your website visitor’s interaction with your web pages. Bounce rate is impacted by their entering your website, and the exit rate is impacted by their leaving your website and overall site traffic. There are two reasons a person will leave a page: either it wasn’t what they were looking for or there were technical problems with the page. Your bounce rate will show you how well your landing pages are performing, while your exit rate will show you how well your overall website flow is performing. By looking at the differences between bounce rate vs exit rate and depicting the reasoning behind them, you can end up improving your website’s traffic flow as well as extend your visitors’ stay.

What is Bounce Rate?

Your bounce rate measures the number of people who land on a page on your website and then leave almost immediately without clicking on any other pages. If any of your web pages have a high bounce rate, this can be a warning sign that something is wrong with your page. People typically bounce off a page if they accidentally clicked on it, it wasn’t what they were looking for, the page wasn’t user-friendly, or the query that person typed in was answered quickly on your page. A high bounce rate should make you question your page’s content and its responsiveness.

Also, consider what keywords are driving your traffic. Are they the right keywords? If people are stumbling upon one of your web pages on accident due to a misleading keyword, of course, they will bounce right back off. Your ideal bounce rate is anywhere between 40 and 70 percent, though you can shoot for 20. If your bounce rate ever goes over 70 percent, something is definitely wrong, and you should reevaluate that page.

How to Reduce Your Bounce Rates

Avoid self-loading multimedia content. Visitors tend to bounce because the landing page won’t load fast enough. This lack of speed is typically caused by an overload of self-loading multimedia content. Slow loading time and too many pop-up ads over the content chase visitors away faster than anything else. You might as well post a Keep Away sign on your website. If ads have to be on your site, find out how to keep them contained on the side.

What is Exit Rate?

Exit rate is the percentage of people who leave your site from a specific page (not the first page). It’s measured once a visitor on your site progresses past the first page they land on. If they visit your site and look at one page for an hour, that time is still measured as a bounce. But once they start to click through your website, they’ve become eligible to provide you with an exit rate. Your exit rate will show you a visitor’s path they took on your website and which page they decided to exit on. Keep in mind that people do have to exit your website at some point. The key is finding out when and where they exited to see if you might extend people’s attention to a further point on your site.

If your website’s pages have been done correctly, they along with landing pages should ultimately lead a visitor to convert to your business. If your exit rates are showing visitors never make it to that point, your copy probably could use some more work for optimization. Before you panic at the site of a high exit rate on a page, look at what page it is. What is its role? If the high exit rate is occurring on the last page of a blog, you have nothing to worry about. People are supposed to exit then. Your worry should come when high exit rates are commonly appearing on an important page in your funnel, such as a landing page, that should be leading your visitor to a new page to take action. If they never arrive on that page, you aren’t getting any business. Since fixing this problem could be as simple as making your call-to-actions more compelling or tweaking your copy to be more convincing, you’ll want to make sure you’re keeping an eye on what pages your exit rates are highest. You may be losing a lot of unnecessary business.

How to Reduce Your Exit Rates

Optimize your content. The copy on your web pages needs to be tailored to your buyer persona. What are your customers’ goals? What do they want to hear from you? Second, the information needs to be easy to navigate with clear headings and subheadings and bullets. Words work best when they are stylized and laid out in manageable sections for a person to tackle. If they were to see a block of text spread over a page, they will likely run. However, cut it up into sections, label it, throw some images in, and people will gladly skim through what you have to say. And lastly, your content needs to have one clear call-to-action your audience can’t ignore. Otherwise, they may not feel inclined to become one of your next customers.

In addition to keeping your website user-friendly, you can also try A/B testing on your web pages to discover which aren’t performing as well as they should be. Start from the bottom of the funnel and test your way up to improve your conversion funnel.

Bounce rates and exit rates are just a way to let you know how many people are visiting which pages on your website and for how long. They show you how effective your pages are and how user-friendly your website is. Any time those rates are too high, you need to take a look at what might be going on with either your site as a whole or with your individual pages. It’s expected for people to leave at some point. Just not the second they see you or before they reach your call-to-action.

Titan Web Marketing Solutions based in Murfreesboro, TN provides SEO Services to businesses throughout the United States. If your company needs SEO help Contact Us today.