Website metrics for business owners: bounce rate & top exit pages

For most businesses, website metrics represent a largely unexplored area, one in which more businesses should pay attention. Continuing from last week’s blog about metrics, this week, we will focus on: bounce rate and top exit pages.

Bounce rate is the number of visitors who only view one page and then leave the site. While a high bounce rate is typically viewed as bad, it is good to note that users may be finding the information they are looking for and do not need to visit additional pages. Additionally, if your website consists of one responsive page, as many modern sites do, you will automatically have a high bounce rate. Again, this is not necessarily bad, depending on your circumstances.

Top exit pages are important to watch to make sure that your visitors are all not leaving on the same page. If the majority of your traffic is leaving your site after viewing the same page, you may need to look into revamping that page. The reason for exit could be that users are not finding the information they expected, the page is taking too long to load, or does not have the information the user expected to see.

If targeted visitors are leaving pages that have content they are searching for, this could be a signal of a larger issue. Visitors leaving in this manner could be signaling that the website performance is poor and the visitors could be leaving before the page even finishes loading. Additionally, it’s important to view your server’s error log to ensure that particular page isn’t returning errors to your visitors.

Come back next Friday to learn about page views and top requested pages.