Even though it is an integral part of the equation, the Exit Rate is not as much talked about as the Bounce Rate. Part of the problem is that most people think they are the same thing because both of them are used for calculating the percentage of the people who left a web page early and that is where the need to differentiate between them arises.
To understand the basic difference between them you need to pay attention because it is very subtle, that is why so many people fail to grasp it. Bounce rate is the percentage of how many people came to your website to give a visit and left without navigating it and exploring other pages belonging to your websites.
Unlike Pogo Sticking, Bounce rate is not always bad for you because there is always a possibility that users might have bookmarked your page for future use or didn’t read it because they were already familiar with your content and just came to the page to share it on a social media platform or any other forum. A bounce is bad for you only if the user spends less than 10 seconds on your web page and leaves.
Exit rate on the other hand is the percentage of how many users left a particular web page after coming across it. If you want an accurate calculation of how the popularity of your website is increasing or decreasing, you have separate exit rates for every single page to do that. There are many more differentiating factors between the two terms that help us distinguish them and one of the major ones is that Bounce rate doesn’t always equate to the exit rate. If a visitor comes to your website and navigates through it after finding your content full of quality and worth their time, they will most probably visit other pages as well. But when they leave your website, no matter how much time they spent here, their exit will contribute to the exit rate of the last web page of your website that they visited.
While there are many ways to interpret the meaning of a high percentage of exit rates, increasing bounce rate is always a cause of worry because it indirectly, sometimes directly, indicates that your website or some particular pages with a high bounce rate is not user friendly or impressive enough for the users and you need to improve.