Exit pages

Exit pages are the final page your visitor looks at before leaving your site. These are important pages because they are your last chance to encourage your visitor to look at other pages and content. It’s worthwhile looking at each of these pages and figuring out whether they can be improved to make them more sticky (i.e. visitors stay on them longer and move to other pages after reading them).

A number of factors can be examined for each exit page which can help improve them:

  1. Bounce rate
  2. Time on page
  3. Follow on pages

Bounce rate

Bounce rate is when someone comes to a page and leaves within 15 seconds. That is they look at the page and decide it’s not for them and so they leave the site. With exit pages this needs to be examined. If you have a high bounce rate on an exit page then it means people are coming to the page and leaving immediately. You therefore need to try to get into the mind of your visitors and figure out why they are leaving.

If you’d like to find more information on how to fix high bounce rates we have a whole page on bounce rate which provides more detail.

Time on page

Time on page refers to how long visitors are spending on any given page of the website. This time on an exit page is important because it indicates how interesting visitors are finding the page. A good way to judge what a reasonable time for spending on the page is to time yourself reading the page. Once you have that time add/subtract 30% and then you’ll have a good range of times.

Armed with a range of reasonable time on page you’ll be able to make some judgements about the page and how visitors are reacting to it. IF they are reacting well (inside the range) perhaps you just need to up the links on the page to encourage them to go to other pages. If they aren’t reacting well (outside the range) then you need to look at improving the on page experience.

If you’d like more information about time on page please have a look at our fuller explanation here.

Follow on pages

Follow on pages are the pages people go to after the exit page. You’ll find that although pages may be marked as exit pages in some case people will have gone onto another page in your site (i.e. not all visitors will have left the site from the same exit page. These pages are worthwhile looking at. Ask yourself why did people go to them form a given page and what made them click the link to go there. This will help you to improve the exit page. You’re simply strengthening what is already there.