Scott Bush

It’s been a while since I posted anything technical, so here’s something for the web geeks: an analytics definition. Granted, if you’re into web analytics you probably already know this. But I found myself explaining the difference between a bounce and an exit to my colleagues at a recent meeting where I was presenting information about visitors to our company’s site. A picture diagram is worth a thousand words, so I sketched something out that illustrated the difference. It was useful, so I thought I’d do it up right and post it here.

First, the textual definition:

• Bounce: visitors arriving at a page on your site, then leaving without visiting any other page within your site.
• Exit: visitors arriving at a page on your site, visiting one or more pages within your site before leaving.

Pages with a high bounce rate can indicate the page doesn’t have what the person wants. For example, they hit that page from Google or other search engine because they thought it’d be relevant to what they’re searching for. They arrive, scan the page and realize it’s not what they want and hit back. That’s a bounce in the negative sense. But, a bounce can also be positive. The person arrives, reads the page and has their question answered, so they close their browser, type in another website, open a bookmarked site, etc. To distinguish between “positive” and “negative” bounces, you’d have to evaluate the content on the page and the average time spent on the page. But I digress.

On the other hand, all sites have exit pages… visitors aren’t going to only visit pages on your site. Eventually they go to another site. But ideally they do so after they’ve completed a conversion process of some kind. For example, they hit your page from Google because they’re interested in, say, some software you wrote and sell on your site. Ideally, visitors would arrive on the site’s info page, then click around to features, demo, and pricing pages before hitting the purchase/download page. You’d expect people to exit the site from the “thank you for purchasing/downloading” page because they accomplished a goal: getting your software.

Here’s a visual representation of the difference between a bounce and an exit. You can also read this succinct post over at the Google Analytics forum.