What is the difference between exit rate and bounce rate?

Analytics

Bounce rate is the percentage of sessions during which visitors left your website after viewing only one page. But there’s a slight nuance to how the bounce is counted.

If the visitor completes a set goal or buys a product (ecommerce conversion), the bounce will not be counted, even though the visitor viewed only one page.

Bounce rate is counted in this way:

Bounce rate = (Bounces / Sessions) * 100%

Bounces: The number of sessions during which visitors viewed an entry page but didn’t continue to another page view, goal conversion, or ecommerce conversion.

Note: When a visitor performs a custom event like downloads a file, types a query in a search, or signs up for a newsletter on the entry page, the bounce will be counted.

Exit rate is the percentage of sessions that finished on a selected page. If a visitor left your website from a home page, an exit will be counted for that page. A visitor may have viewed only this page or more pages in this session.

Exit rate is counted in this way:

Exit rate = (Exits / Sessions) * 100%

Exits: The number of page views for a page that was the last during a session.

To make it more clear for you, here’s an example:

  • Somebody visits page A > competes a goal
  • Somebody visits page A
  • Somebody visits page A > page B
  • Somebody visits page A

The bounce rate for page A is 50%. Four sessions started with page A and during two sessions (2 and 4) visitors didn’t move to another page nor performed any further actions.

The exit rate for page A is 75%. There were 4 sessions on page A. Three of them (1, 2, and 4) finished on page A. One session finished on page B.

In Piwik PRO, we also use a metric called a page bounce rate. This is an accurate metric for counting bounce rate for a page URL or page title.

Page bounce rate = (Bounces / Entries) * 100%

Page bounce rate: An accurate bounce rate for a page URL or page title. The percentage of sessions during which visitors viewed only that page and didn’t continue to another page view, goal conversion, or ecommerce conversion.

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