The other day, Ochiai, a new staff member who recently joined us, asked me this question.

"What's the difference between 'bounce rate' and 'exit rate'?"

These days I've studied enough to earn a Web Analyst certification and I analyze traffic on clients' websites, so I like to think I have a decent grasp of it — but the question took me back to when I first entered this industry.

Back then, I had exactly the same question as Ochiai!

Bounce rate means people who look at just one page and leave, right?
And exit rate also means people who leave, right?

………So what's the difference!!!

That's about how it went ^_^;

To be honest, I didn't really understand the difference between sessions and users either. (I'll write about that difference in my next blog post.)

So in this article, I'll explain the difference between bounce rate and exit rate.
Nobody understood it at first, so don't think "Uh-oh, is it bad that I don't know this?" — just learn it here and you're good to go.

Bounce rate = the percentage of visits that viewed only one page and left
Exit rate = the percentage of visits that left the site from that page

To get straight to the point: bounce rate is the percentage of visits that viewed only one page and then left, while exit rate is the percentage of visits in which that page was the last one viewed before leaving.

For example, if your top page has a bounce rate of 60%, that means 60% of the people (or more precisely, visits) viewed only the top page and then left your website.
So what about the remaining 40%? They moved on to other pages on your site, such as the company profile or the staff blog.
They were interested enough to go deeper into the site.

Now suppose someone went deeper into the site out of interest, but on the company profile page realized the company was far away from where they live, so they left your site and went back to the search results.
That's an exit.

Let's say the company profile page has an exit rate of 40%. In that case, 40% of the people (again, more precisely, visits) who browsed around your site left from the company profile page.

Bounce rate = the percentage of visits that viewed only one page and left
Exit rate = the percentage of visits that left the site from that page

Does that make sense?

Is a lower bounce rate always better?

Setting aside exits, since visitors have to leave from somewhere eventually, does that mean the lower the bounce rate the better?

The answer: not necessarily.

That's because, depending on the case, there are websites where visitors don't (or aren't meant to) browse around.

Take, for example, the very long, vertically scrolling pages known as landing pages, which are often used for advertising. These frequently include response mechanisms leading to conversions — inquiries or applications — within a single page, and they aren't designed to send visitors to other pages in the first place, so their bounce rate is high.

The bounce rate goes up, but since that single page is set up so visitors can take every action leading to a conversion (it's designed to make that happen), a high bounce rate does not equal a bad thing.

The same goes for exit rate: even if visitors didn't move on to another page, if they got the information they needed and the page did its job before they left, that's not a bad thing.
Thank-you pages for inquiry forms (pages that display messages like "Thank you for your inquiry.") and purchase completion pages often have high exit rates, but that's only natural, since many people leave after achieving their goal.

For this reason, the numbers you should aim for vary from page to page, so you can't make blanket statements like "a bounce rate under XX% is good" or "a page with an exit rate above XX% is a bad page."
Consider each page's role as you assess its bounce and exit rates, and use them as a guide for managing your website!