Exit Pages – Leaving the Online Party

Leaving a party can be easy or difficult. The hosts can be glad to see you go or be begging you to stay. Sometimes you leave the same way you came in; sometimes you mingle a bit and exit through a different door. Just like parties, leaving websites can be complicated but inevitable. Given that inevitability, should site analysts even worry about where visitors are leaving their sites? That is, what is the value of knowing a site’s common exit pages?  

Exit Pages vs. Bounces  

Opentracker’s definition is a good one: an exit page is “the last page a visitor views before leaving your site." And because, like party guests, visitors can’t stay on your site forever, some poor page has to take the fall as the exit page, right?  That’s exactly the argument Avinash Kaushik makes in his book, Web Analytics 2.0, writing, “[Visitors’] exit from a page is no indication of the greatness, or lack thereof, of that particular page!” (2010, p. 54). 

He goes on to argue that exit pages and rates are not half as useful their close cousin, the bounce rate, which more quickly reveals what he calls “bad” exits (2010, p. 54). That’s because bounce rates point out dud pages that serve as both entrance and exit – bounces are like a party guest peeking in the door, being so horrified by who/what they see in there that they don’t even take off their coat, have a drink or eat an appetizer, but instead back slowly out and run the other way down the street. 

Stepped Processes

Of course, we hope most party guests at least come inside and mingle a bit, and while they all must ultimately leave, as hosts, we feel there are more and less opportune times for them to do so. This becomes especially important when parties are structured sequentially, say a three-course dinner party. If I invite you to such an event, I expect you to stay for all three courses; if you left after the appetizer or the main course, without staying through to dessert, I would question my cooking and/or our friendship. 

Such sequential structured experiences are the rare instances in which Kaushik advocates for the importance of exit pages (2010, p. 55). If there is a stepped process online, say getting from a product detail page to a shopping cart page to a payment page, it becomes extremely important to know how many visitors aren’t completing the full process and from what page they seem to be dropping off. 

   

Brian Gavin Diamonds became alarmed when pages in their checkout process were among the site’s most exited. In fact, they figured that more than $500k in sales were being abandoned in shoppers’ carts each month. Using that data, they instituted a new “guest” checkout process and saw 60% more online visitors actually complete their purchases.  

Internal Search

While not a stepped process, internal site search is another area that can be improved by examining exit page/rate metrics. Tom Bowen argues that if the internal site search results page is one of your site’s top exit pages, it clearly means that users aren’t finding what they’re looking for, as they aren’t making any further clicks. Since internal site search is so heavily relied upon as a navigational tool, such a finding would definitely be worth a second look. 

Let Them Leave – But at the Right Time

Your site is like an online party you’re throwing, and sure, you don’t mind that guests leave (in fact, at some point you’d insist), but you do want it to be on good terms and at the right time. Exit pages can help you determine that.