The Meaning of the Google Analytics Exit Percentage

by Luke Arthur
Google Analytics metrics, when taken together, give you a detailed look visitor behavior.


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As a webmaster, Google Analytics provides you with many statistics that you can use to analyze the traffic that visits your website. One of the metrics that you will find in the content section of Analytics is "Exit Percentage." This statistic provides you valuable information about where your visitors are leaving from.

What is Exit Percentage?

Exit percentage or exit rate tells you how many people leave your site from a particular page. Every visitor that comes to your site eventually leaves it in one way or another. This statistic tells you which pages they are leaving from. To calculate the exit rate, Analytics looks at the total number of exits from each page in relation to the total number of page views for that particular page. It then divides the exits by the page views and calculates the percentage.

Determine User Behavior

One of the primary reasons that the exit percentage or exit rate is important is that it tells you what your visitors are doing when they get to your site. You can look at the exit percentage and tell exactly how many people are leaving from each page. If your customers are leaving the site from a "Thank You" page or after completing a sale, this may be desirable. If they are leaving from other pages, it may be because the information you provided is not sufficient to help your visitors.

Exit vs. Bounce

In Google Analytics, you see a column for "Bounce Rate" and one for "Exit Rate." While these statistics are very similar, they provide you with different information. A bounce occurs when a visitor comes to your website and only looked at a single page before leaving your site. When a visitor bounces they do not visit any other pages on your site. The exit rate does not take into consideration how many pages the visitor looked at. It only looks at the exits compared to the total visits.


Some webmasters pay close attention to the exit rate of their site's pages at all times. While it is a valuable statistic to keep track of, it is not the only thing that you should look at. You must take all of the statistics that are provided by Google Analytics in context and analyze the data accordingly. Otherwise, you may end up making assumptions about your site that are inaccurate.

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