Exit rate will vary from one page to the next on your website. Order confirmation pages or thank you pages for lead generation websites will naturally have higher exit rates than other pages. As a general rule of thumb, pages from which visitors are expected to leave the site can have 90% or higher exit rates. Visitors who arrive on these pages have completed the conversion action and will obviously leave the site. Pages from which visitors are expected to continue navigating through the website, such as the main home page, should have a target exit rate of less than 10% to 20%. Anything higher than that might reveal some hidden problems that need to be addressed.
Bounce rate and exit rate might sound similar to each other, but they are used to measure different visitor behavior on a website. Bounce rate deals with a visitor’s first impressions of your website. It measures the effectiveness of the landing page design and copy to persuade visitors to remain on the site and take a particular action on the landing page. Exit rate, on the other hand, is used to detect breakdowns in process flow in the website.
The world of offline sales lacks terms that mirror exit rate and bounce rate. However, adapting bounce and exit rate definitions to offline sales can be insightful.
A lead must go through different steps in the offline sales funnel before converting. The complexity of this funnel and how quickly leads move through it depend on the nature of the product or service you are selling. A typical sales funnel includes the following stages:
Awareness
Interest
Evaluation
Action
Leads enter at the awareness stage and exit as customers in the action stage. Bounce rate in the offline world is the percentage of leads that have a single touch point with your business and decide to not pursue the relationship further. It represents the percentage of leads that start at the awareness level but never move to the interest stage. High offline bounce rates indicate either a problem with the quality of the leads entering the funnel or sales issues you must address during the initial contact with leads.
Exit rate in offline sales is the percentage of leads that have multiple touch points with your business but ultimately decide not to continue within the sales funnel. It is the percentage of visitors who move from one stage to the next, starting at the awareness stage and moving farther down the process but never getting to the action stage. High exit rates might indicate a breakdown of your selling process or a poor qualification process.