Date First Published: 12th December 2022
Topic: Web Design & Development
Subtopic: SEO
Article Type: Computer Terms & Definitions
Difficulty: MediumDifficulty Level: 5/10
Learn more about what exit rate is in this article.
Exit rate is the percentage of visitors that exit a certain page after visiting any number of pages on the website. For example, if a visitor landed on Page A, clicked on an internal link to Page B, and closed their web browser, that would increase the exit rate of Page B as they left on that page. They did not originally land on Page B, so it is not a bounce. Also, they clicked on something on Page A, so it is not a bounce on Page A either.
A high exit rate for a page suggests that the page is often the last one that people visit before exiting the website. This is not always indicative of bad user experience as it can mean that users have found what they were looking for, but a slow load page time, too many distracting elements, and technical issues can contribute to a high exit rate.
Exit rate is not to be confused with bounce rate.
Exit rate can be calculated using this formula:
Total number of users who exit on the page ÷ Total number of page visits
For example, if 700 people visit Page B and 250 of them exit on that page after visiting other pages, the calculation would be:
250 ÷ 700 = 0.35
As a percentage, 0.35 is 35%
Exit rate = 35%
In order to check the exit rate in Google Analytics, go to Behaviour - Site content - All pages. The exit column that contains a percentage is the exit rate of the page.
No, exit rate is not a ranking factor. Exit rate is too easy to manipulate and not indicative enough of user experience to be used as a ranking factor. In fact, search engines have no way of measuring the exit rate of a website, since this would require them to measure the traffic of a website, which they cannot measure unless the website has analytics code on the page that is linked to a service owned by them. Google does not look at Google Analytics exit rate data to rank pages.
Exit rate is a useful metric as it can determine where visitors are mostly exiting a website and whether they are exiting on appropriate pages, but it has no effect on the ranking of pages in search engines, such as Google and Bing. We urge you to be wary of any studies that link exit rate with search engine rankings.
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