Exit Rate

Minimizing exit rate is one of the best ways to improve your website performance and customer experience. By definition, exit rate is “the percentage of visitors to a page on the website from which they exit the website to a different website” (thanks, Wikipedia!). More specifically, we like to look at exit rate as the tool to best identify your best- and worst-performing pages. While the metric seems simple on the surface, it gives valuable insights into areas of future growth and improvement. We'll take you through how to calculate this metric, how to understand it in the context of your industry, and how to apply it to the platforms you're using now.

How to Calculate Exit Rate

You can calculate exit rate by dividing the total amount of exits from a page by the total amount of visits to that page. Exit rates can be calculated for various time-periods (i.e. day, week, month, year), and, as mentioned above, are intended for different pages within a website.

If you’re confused about how to define the total amount of exits and the total amount of visits, we’ve included some nifty explanations below:

• The total amount of exits is how many people left your website after viewing a certain page. For instance, suppose I visited Lido Home > Blog > Metrics, then left the Lido domain. From this, I would have created one exit for the Metrics page (and only the Metrics page).
• The total amount of visits is how many people viewed a certain page. Take the previous example. Although I exited on the Metrics page, I still visited Lido Home and Blog, so I would have created three visits in total (one for Lido Home, one for Blog, and one for Metrics). If I’m the only traffic to the site, then Lido Home and Blog would have a 0% exit rate (0 exits / 1 visit for each), and Metrics would have a 100% exit rate (1 exit / 1 visit).

At this point, it’s also worth mentioning bounce rate, which gets commonly confused with exit rate. Bounce rate only includes exits from users that visited exactly one page within the website. So, my former website behavior (visiting Lido Home > Blog > Metrics > exit) would not count towards the bounce rate, but a path like Lido Home > exit would count. To calculate bounce rate, you can divide the total amount of one-page visits for a page by the total amount of entrances to that page. If you’d like more of an explanation, visit our bounce rate metric page.

When choosing what to include in your calculations, remember: consistency is key! That means, if you track your exit rate on a weekly basis, you should compare weekly exit rates over time. Having consistent metrics will allow you to better identify patterns and the causes of good or bad performance. For instance, if, over the past few weeks, you’ve placed more internal links in your blog posts and exit rate for blog posts decreased, then you’ll know that action was effective in keeping traffic on your website!

Connecting Exit Rate to Your Business

Again, as you begin (consistently) monitoring exit rates, you’ll be able to find insights specific to your strategy. Of course, it’s also important to understand exit rates in the context of your website. For instance, a high exit rate for an Order Confirmation page or Thank You page makes sense since it’s likely the end of your customer’s journey for that visit. On the other hand, a high exit rate for a Cart Summary page or any page right before checkout may cause some alarm. At that point, it would be worth investigating what’s making people leave, whether it be slow page speed or mobile-unfriendliness.

While you can find your exit rate in a variety of ways, we’ve identified popular platforms that are particularly relevant. These may be good places to begin if you’re getting started with this metric:

• Google Analytics: As a platform made for website data, finding exit rates is a simple process. From your home page, go to Behavior > Site Content > Exit Pages to see your pages with the most amount of exits. If you’re interested in a particular page, you can use the search bar on the data table. ‍
• Facebook Analytics: Similar to Google Analytics, once you’ve set up Facebook Pixel, its analytics page provides a real-time dashboard of website information. To find total amount of exits per page, go to Breakdowns > Create Breakdown > Select Event > Session End > Select Breakdown > Current URL. To find total amount of visits per page, go to Breakdowns > Create Breakdown > Select Event > Session End > Select Breakdown > Current URL.

Tracking Exit Rate with Lido

While exit rate is easy to calculate, it’s important to keep in mind that exit rate is one of many valuable metrics to track your performance. If you don’t want to spend hours at the end of the month juggling numbers from your Google Analytics and Facebook accounts, consider trying Lido. Lido can help you build a dashboard to monitor your data and give a look into how your key metrics (such as exit rate) change over time.

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