Exits is a metric that gives the number of times a value was the last recorded in a visit. A common example is the exit page, i.e. the last page a user viewed before their session ended.

Exit Rate shows, of all the visits to a page, the percentage where it was the last page viewed in the visit. The calculation is;

[Exits / Visits]

For example, if the Homepage was visited 150 times, and in 30 of these visits it was the last page viewed, it would have 30 exits and (30/150) = 20% exit rate. This tells you that in 20% of visits viewing the homepage, it was the last page viewed in the visit.

Exit rate is used with the Page dimension. It can either be used to show exit rate for a specific page or to rank all pages by exit rate. It can be used to identify pages where a high proportion of traffic leaves the site, and so should be optimised to keep customers engaged, on the site and able to progress their journey.

If a page has a high exit rate there may be several reasons behind it which can be considered;

• It is the last page in a process, such as the order confirmation page. In this case you would expect a high exit rate as users have completed their journey.
• The content isn’t relevant or what users expected, or is difficult to find on the page.
• The page is slow to load and users give up waiting.
• There is an issue or defect with the page preventing users from progressing through their journey.
• There is no clear next step for users to progress.

If a page has a low exit rate it means that the majority of customers are progressing through to another page in the site and not leaving from this page.

Exit Rate: Weighted

Consider the below scenario;

Last week Page A had 5 visits and 4 exits, resulting in 80% exit rate

Last week Page B has 3,000 visits and 1,500 exits, resulting in 50% entry rate.

Which page should be prioritised for review?

If ranking by exit rate, Page A would appear very high on the list, while Page B would be much lower down. However, only 4 customers exited from Page A whereas 1,500 customers exited from Page B.

Therefore, as changes to Page B would impact a much greater volume of customers, it should take priority over Page A.

But on a website with tens of thousands of pages, how do you identify the biggest opportunities? This is where Exit Rate: Weighted comes in useful. As well as looking at the exit rate of a page, it also takes into consideration the proportion of total site traffic that page accounts for, meaning that as in the example above, pages with lower exit rate but much higher traffic will be ranked above high exit but low traffic pages. The calculation is;

[Exits / Visits] x [Visits / Total Visits]

If total visits was equal to 10,000, then in the example above Page A would have

[4/5] x [5/10,000] = 0.4% Exit Rate: Weighted

While Page B would have

[1,500/3,000] x [3,000/10,000] = 15% Exit Rate: Weighted

Therefore in a ranked report Page B would rank above Page A, and the most important pages to focus on would be at the top of the list.