An exit from the contact, hours or directions page usually means the visit did its job. Judge each exit page against its purpose, and record calls, map clicks and form submissions so finished visits show up.

A list that looks like bad news

Open the Exit Pages report in Analytics and the top of the list is often the contact page, then the hours and location page, then directions.

It reads like a list of failures: the pages where people gave up and left.

An exit means only that the visit ended there. On a small business site, ending on the page with the phone number is very often the point.

The visitor found the number and called, or read the hours and set off. Analytics records the departure and nothing else.

Exits and bounces are different

The exit rate of a page is the share of its views that were the last in a visit, wherever the visit began.

The bounce rate is narrower: the share of visits that started on that page and went nowhere else.

A contact page with a high exit rate and a low bounce rate describes people who read about the services, came to the contact page and left. That is the shape of a good visit.

Both figures appear in the All Pages report under Behaviour, and exits have a report of their own beside it.

Pages whose job is to end the visit

The fifth misleads the most. When a booking button opens a system on another address, Analytics sees the visit end, so the busiest booking page can look like the worst page on the site.

Pages whose job is to pass people on

Other pages exist to move visitors along: the home page, service pages, product categories, the cart and each step of checkout.

A high exit rate on those deserves a look, especially among visitors who arrived from inside the site and were plainly heading somewhere.

Write each important page's job beside its name, once. Most of the confusion in the exit report disappears when every page is judged against its own purpose.

Finished jobs leave a trace

A visit that did its job usually did something first: tapped the phone number, opened the map, pressed the booking button or sent the form.

Each of those can be recorded. Taps and clicks become events, through Google Tag Manager or a few lines of code, and a thank-you page can become a goal in Analytics.

An exit after a trace is then a finished visit, and an exit with no trace is a question. Analytics can show visits with a goal completion separately from those without, which makes the difference visible.

A worked example

A fishing tackle shop near a river mouth opens at dawn from spring to fall. Its website carries the hours, a weekly fishing report written by the owner, and a contact form for special orders and rod repairs.

The top three exit pages were the fishing report, the hours page and the contact page. The owner had read that high exits were bad and was ready to redesign the report.

The report's visitors mostly arrived straight on it, on phones, early in the morning and the evening before. They came for river conditions and left with them.

The hours page told the same story, with visits from before five in the morning that ended in the shop's parking lot.

The contact page was the real problem, and its exit rate gave no sign of it. The thank-you page behind the form had not been viewed in six weeks.

An update had left the send button doing nothing on phones. Visitors pressed it, saw no change and left, exactly as satisfied visitors leave.

The developer fixed the conflict, made the thank-you page a goal, and recorded taps on the phone number as events. A custom alert now tells the owner if a week passes without a form arriving.

Reading an exit page in context

For each page near the top of the report, ask what it is for, and where its visitors came from: straight from a search, or from another page on the site.

Check the device and the time of day, and whether anything happened before the exit, such as a tap, a click or a form.

Then look for sudden change. A jump in exits on a page whose job has not changed, perhaps after an update, is worth an annotation and a closer look.

When an exit is a warning

Some exits do deserve worry, and not only from pages meant to pass people on.

Quick exits by visitors who arrived from inside the site suggest they were looking for something and did not find it.

Exits from the page saying an address could not be found mean a broken link is sending people there. Its page title makes it easy to spot in the report.

Calls Analytics never sees

Plenty of finished visits leave no trace at all. Someone reads the number on a computer and dials it on a desk phone, or notes the hours and comes in on Saturday.

Asking callers how they found you fills part of the gap, and Google My Business Insights adds calls made from the listing itself.

Neither is complete. Together with recorded taps and goals, they are enough to stop reading every exit as a loss.

The counter-case

A small site may not get enough visits for its exit report to mean much page by page. There, the questions callers ask are better evidence.

On a one-page site every visit exits from the same page, so the figure says nothing.

And where bookings or sales happen on another company's system, most of the story is in that system's reports rather than yours.

Everywhere else, judge each exit page against its job, and record the traces that show a visit finished well.

Before blaming a page

  1. Open the Exit Pages report for the last quarter.
  2. Write each top page's job beside it.
  3. Record phone taps as events.
  4. Make your thank-you page a goal.
  5. Track clicks to maps and booking systems.
  6. Compare visits with and without a goal.
  7. Set an alert for weeks without a form.

Step four is the one that would have caught the broken form within days. A contact page that stops producing thank-you pages looks the same in the exit report, and only a goal shows the difference.

The exit page owners worry about most, the one with the prices, is covered in visitors who look at prices and leave.

Frequently asked questions

Is a high exit rate on my contact page bad?

Usually not. Visitors who find the phone number and call, or read the address and set off, end their visit there. That is the page doing its job.

What is the difference between exit and bounce rate?

Exit rate is the share of a page's views that ended a visit. Bounce rate is the share of visits that started on the page and went nowhere else.

Which pages should have high exit rates?

Contact, hours and location, directions, thank-you pages, booking buttons that hand over to another system, and menus or reports people read and finish.

Which exits should worry me?

Exits from pages meant to pass people on, such as the cart or a form's middle step, quick exits by visitors from inside the site, and exits from the not-found page.

How can I tell a finished visit?

Record what finished visits do first: phone taps and map clicks as events, and the thank-you page as a goal. An exit with no trace is the one to question.

Why set the thank-you page as a goal?

Because a broken form looks the same in the exit report. Without a goal, visitors pressing a dead send button leave just as satisfied visitors do.

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.

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