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.