What is exit rate?
Exit rate is the share of views of a page that ended the session. The formula, a worked example, and the exact difference from bounce rate.
What is exit rate?
Exit rate is the share of views of a given page that were the last page of the session. Every view of that page counts in the denominator, no matter where in the journey it appeared. It tells you where visits end, which is the practical question when you are hunting for a leak in a multi-step flow.
The formula.
Exit rate for a page = (exits from that page / total views of that page) x 100
- exits
- Sessions whose final recorded pageview was this page.
- total views
- Every pageview of this page in the period, first page of a session or not.
Bounce rate uses a different denominator: only the sessions that STARTED on the page. That single difference is the whole distinction.
A worked example.
A four-step checkout, one week.
| Views of /checkout/shipping | 2,100 |
|---|---|
| Sessions that ended on /checkout/shipping | 588 |
| Sessions that started on /checkout/shipping | 12 |
| Calculation | 588 / 2,100 |
Exit rate = 28%, bounce rate = under 1%
Bounce rate says the page is fine, because almost nobody lands there directly. Exit rate says more than a quarter of everyone who reaches shipping abandons there. Only one of those two numbers is telling you where the money is going.
Exit rate versus bounce rate
The two are constantly confused, and the confusion costs money on exactly the pages that matter most.
Bounce rate asks: of the sessions that began on this page, how many ended immediately? Exit rate asks: of all the views of this page, how many were the last thing the visitor saw? A deep page in a funnel can have a near-zero bounce rate and a terrible exit rate at the same time, because nobody arrives there cold but plenty of people give up there.
Every bounce is also an exit. Not every exit is a bounce. On a landing page with no inbound internal links the two numbers converge; anywhere else they diverge, and the gap is where the useful information lives.
Where exit rate earns its keep
Exit rate is the right metric whenever a page is supposed to lead somewhere: checkout steps, signup forms, onboarding screens, multi-page guides.
The pattern to look for is a step whose exit rate is well above its neighbours. A shipping step at 28% when the steps either side sit at 8% is not a gradual funnel narrowing, it is a specific problem on that screen: an unexpected cost, a required field, a slow validation call, a layout that breaks on mobile.
A high exit rate is not automatically bad. An order confirmation page should have an exit rate close to 100%, because the journey is finished. Context decides, as it does with every rate metric.
See it on real data
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Open the live demoReading an exit rate properly
Compare to the neighbouring steps
Absolute exit rate means little. The step-to-step delta is the signal. Plot the sequence and the outlier is obvious.
Weight by volume
A 90% exit rate on a page with 40 views is noise. A 30% exit rate on a page with 20,000 views is a project. Sort by exits, not by rate.
Split by device
Exit spikes concentrated on mobile are almost always layout or input problems: a field that triggers the wrong keyboard, a button under the fold, a form that loses state on rotate.
Watch it after every release
Exit rate on a key step is the fastest regression detector you have. A deploy that breaks a form shows up here hours before anyone files a support ticket.
How Mrkr reports exits
Mrkr shows exits and exit rate per page alongside pageviews, and the same data drives funnel drop-off, so the number you see on the page report and the number you see at a funnel step agree with each other.
When an exit rate spikes and you cannot see why, session replay is the shortest path to an answer: watch a handful of the sessions that ended on that page and the cause is usually visible in under a minute.
Exits are derived from session ordering, which Mrkr reconstructs without a persistent cookie in its default mode.
Questions, answered.
Related terms.
- What is bounce rate?
Bounce rate is the share of sessions that end without a second interaction: one page loads, nothing else is recorded, and the visitor leaves.
- What is conversion funnel?
A conversion funnel is an ordered sequence of steps a visitor takes toward a goal, measured by how many people reach each step.
- What is session?
A session is one continuous visit to a site: a group of pageviews and events from the same visitor with no long gap between them.
- What is landing page?
In analytics, a landing page is the first page a visitor sees in a session, whatever page that happens to be.
- What is session replay?
Session replay reconstructs a visitor's session as a playable recording of what happened on screen.
Where this shows up in Mrkr
- Find the step people abandon with Mrkr funnel analysis
Drop-off per step, with the sessions behind each drop one click away.
- Watch the sessions that ended on the page with session replay
- Browse the full analytics glossary
Every metric, method and privacy term, defined in one place.
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