I’ve decided to follow up my post from last week on entry page analysis with a post on how you can go beyond just looking at your top exit pages. I’ll start by pointing out the obvious fact that every visitor who comes to your site will eventually exit your site. That means entry pages will equal exit pages. The question then becomes where are the visitors dropping off the site and why are they leaving?

You can run a simple top exit page report to see the top pages where visitors are leaving, but what will that really tell you? Not that much in my opinion. Unless you compare exit pages to other data points and fully understand the site you’re analyzing to know, among other things, what pages are being used for your various marketing campaigns then you won’t really get much value out of your analysis.

Here are five simple steps that should be taken when analyzing exit pages.

1. Look at the Top Exit Pages in Comparison to Unique Visitors to Each of the Pages.

This allows you to put the exit number into perspective by comparing the exits to the unique visitors of that page. If for example, your top exited page had 100,000 exits and your next highest exited page had 70,000 exits then you may think that there is something seriously wrong with the page. There very well may be issues with the page, but you can’t jump to conclusions until you dig deeper. Now say you compare the unique visitors to the top exit pages and find that there were 500,000 unique visitors to the page that had 100,000 exits. It now doesn’t seem to be performing as poorly as you had originally thought, but you still need to dig deeper.

2 Add in Single Access Pages into the Analysis.

You’ll now have your list of top exit pages along with the unique visitors to those pages and the number of single access visits of those pages. Next you should compare the number of single accesses of each top exited page to the number of unique visitors to the page. This allows you to look at your top exited pages from another perspective. Instead of looking at every visitor who came to the page and then left, you’ll be able to look at just those who came directly to that page and immediately left the site.

3. Look at the Pages that have Stuck out in Your Analysis

When doing the calculations in the first two steps make sure to flag any of the pages that have a high percentage. The percentage will vary, but I generally look at those over 40%. These should be the pages that you then go back to and take a look at the actual page to see if you can visually see what is causing the problems. Is there too much content on the page? Is the content relevant? Is there a clear call to action?

4. Analysis of Conversions from the Pages

Even though there is a high exit rate does the page drive a lot of visitors into the conversion funnel and subsequently to convert? This could be the case for PPC landing pages which usually have high exit rates, but will often also have high conversion rates in comparison to other pages on the site. While you can take solace in the fact that these pages are driving conversion it also means that there is room for improvement. Another question to ask is are the top exit pages actually a conversion page or are they goal pages of the site? In that case you’d expect there to be a high drop off rate since they’ve accomplished the goal set out when they came to your site. So unless you know the purpose of the pages you’re analyzing you can’t fully understand why certain pages have a high exit rate and if the high exit rate is necessarily bad.

5. Assess the Traffic Sources to Each of the Exit Pages.

This will help in explaining why some of the pages may have a high number of exits. Certain sources of traffic will tend to have higher exit rates, so if you know this you can help explain why there is a high exit rate. Examples of these would be landing pages for your marketing activities. These will often have a high exit rate and so this needs to be taken into account when you’re doing your analysis.

While looking at your top exit pages may give you initial insight into what pages visitors are dropping off on, it will not give you any insight into why this is happening. As with all analytics, you need to dig deeper to find the real meaning and fully understand those pages so that you can come away with actionable insights that will help improve the performance of the site.

Filed under: Analytics, Education and Training on Thursday, October 4th, 2007 by Nate Linnell |
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.