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The Difference Between Exit Pages and Bounce Rate in Google Analytics   

Google Analytics is a powerful tool for analyzing your data and applying traffic information to future ad campaigns and website layouts. Two metrics many webmaster focus on are exit pages and website bounce rate. Both of these metrics tell you that visitors left your website, but they give you different information for why someone would leave your site. You need to know the difference between the two before you base any website changes on these two metrics.

Exit Pages:
Exit pages can be included in your bounce rate numbers, but not always. An exit page is a page where the user left your site. The exit page could be your landing page or it could be several pageviews into your visitor's session. This minor difference has a large effect on how you evaluate your exit pages.

If you run an ecommerce store, you don't want your exit pages to be in the shopping cart system. When you have shopping cart pages that are mostly your exit pages, it means that your shopping cart system has flaws. It could be trust with your site or a problem with your call to action (CTA). If users don't trust the site, they might not feel comfortable completing the sale, which includes entering private payment information. Poor CTAs also have an effect on conversions and increase your exit page percentage on product and shopping cart pages.

If landing pages have a high exit rate, it means your CTA or layout isn't engaging users. Landing pages should be high quality, strong sales pages that engage users to read more pages or buy product. When your exit pages are your landing pages, it's time to do some experiments with your content, layout and design. Google Analytics also has an "Experiments" section that lets you send a percentage of your traffic to alternative pages. These experiments help you evaluate which layout, design, content, font or any other page alteration improves your conversion rates.

You can have exit pages that aren't a bad sign for your site. For instance, after a customer finishes buying a product, the order confirmation or thank you page should have a high exit rate. As an ecommerce store owner, this type of exit page is expected. Having these pages as your top exit pages is ideal for most ecommerce site owners.

Bounce Rate:
Bounce rate is usually a bad sign, but not always. A visitor contributes to your bounce rate numbers when he opens your site, starts a session and leaves your site without engaging in any of your content.  The user must click "Play" on a video, click a link, or interact with your page in some way for the session to be excluded from your bounce rate.

An exit page can be a part of your bounce rate if the exit page is the same as the landing page. Typically, a page with a high bounce rate should be evaluated for issues. Sometimes, a page is so full of information that the user finds what he's looking for and immediately leaves the site. This happens with sites such as dictionary or wiki sites. If you run an ecommerce store, a high bounce rate is an issue, because the user isn't browsing product or engaging in your content. It's also an issue with blogs or content sites. The impact of bounce rate on a site is dependent on the type of site you run.

You can have a high bounce rate on pages due to several reasons. First, you could have poor navigation or content. If the user can't find navigation links to go to the next page, then the user is more likely to bounce from the site. If you have poorly written content or a font that is hard to read, these issues could also be a problem. Broken pages, poor CTAs, or even poor performing pages are also issues that could cause a high bounce rate on your site.

If you think the issue is layout, CTA or any other part of your site content, you can use Google Analytics Experiments to test different page variants.  You create several page variants with different designs, navigation and layouts. You then use Analytics to send a percentage of your traffic to each page. Use the Analytics reports to identify which page brings in the most conversions.

Bounce rate and exit pages are difficult metrics to understand, especially when you're tied to a specific website layout and style. However, using Google Analytics, you can find the best layout and content that engages users and improves your conversion rates. Analytics is difficult to work with when you're a new site owner, but it's one of the best ways to test your site and increase overall sales.

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7 Proven Ways to Lower Your Website's Bounce Rate:
A high bounce rate can be indicative of any number of problems, from poor site navigation to sub par content or annoying advertisements. Whatever the issue may be, it's a metric that can't be ignored, because it reflects directly on your site's ability to engage and hold the attention of visitors. Below are some of the most effective techniques and strategies for lowering bounce rate and ensuring maximum profit potential:

Create Quality Content:
One of the most common reasons that visitors leave a site without looking at other pages is that the content simply isn't up their standards of quality. Pages that are riddled with errors, sloppily designed, or--worse yet--duplicated or recycled content are a sign for many visitors that their time would be better spent elsewhere.

Meet Expectations:
Even if your content is well-written, you can still lose visitors at a rapid pace if it isn't what they expected to find. Advertise your offerings honestly, and deliver what people want to see within your particular niche. Ads, headlines, and content should never be misleading, because visitors that feel deceived or cheated are unlikely to stay on your page or visit again.

Engage Visitors:
Visitors are more likely to stay on a site and access additional content if there is some degree of personal investment in play. For this reason, taking the initiative through use of social media can be a very useful method of reducing bounce rate and increasing traffic at the same time. Being active and conversing with potential visitors or customers makes meeting expectations and delivering a pleasant user experience that much easier. Enabling comments on your content is another way to engage visitors by involving them in conversations onsite, giving them an incentive to return.

Improve Usability:
A site that is difficult to navigate or read is one of the easiest ways to turn away new visitors and increase your bounce rate. Your pages should be well-organized and professional in appearance. Take the time to set up a site map, link your content to guide traffic, and eradicate broken or outdated links. Make sure to cut extraneous fat that could lead to long load times and slowdown problems: bloated images or design templates, excessive plugins, or unnecessary lines of code.

Ditch Annoying Ads:
While advertising can be a very useful source of revenue, allowing annoying ads to turn away visitors is counterproductive. Whenever possible, avoid pop-ups or multimedia ads that play automatically. Frustrating ads are a great way to send visitors to competing websites instead, so stick to targeted, static ads that don't interfere with viewing your content.

Set Realistic Goals:
When it comes to lowering your bounce rate, it is important to maintain realistic expectations and to set goals accordingly. Using Google Analytics allows you to view benchmark averages for bounce rate based on what type of site you are operating, which in turn gives a general idea of where your site stands in relation to similar competitors. By understanding that, for instance, blogs have a substantially higher average bounce rate than retail sites, it is possible to avoid frustration and disappointment from setting an unrealistic target bounce rate.

Target Multiple Platforms:
One often-ignored tactic for lowering bounce rate is taking the time to ensure that your site is user-friendly for other platforms and browsers. Smartphones and tablets are increasingly being used to access pages online, which means content that can't be accessed and used by those devices is at a serious disadvantage. Making your site mobile-friendly can pay off enormously in terms of reducing bounce rate.

When it comes to increasing revenue and improving visibility, a high bounce rate can signal doom, especially for fledgling or low-traffic sites. The tips above allow you to establish realistic goals, pinpoint specific areas for improvement, and ensure that your site offers everything necessary to keep visitors engaged instead of fleeing to competitors. Bounce rate vs exit pages.