Taken as a whole, exit and bounce statistics won’t be helpful unless one can examine a particular, narrow area or source of traffic.

bounce rate is the way to go.

I once read about a railroad company that found that most accidents involved the caboose, so they decided to leave off the caboose from then on, for safety reasons. I was reminded of that story when reading Avinash Kaushik’s great……

I of course agree on the “eye candy” statement in regards to the IndexTools screenshots - and more seriously I agree that an overall un-segmented “Top exit pages” report is one of the lesser useful reports a web-analyst / marketer can use. But this goes hand in hand with the thought that our good friend Mr. Marshall has been preaching since they introduced segmentation into ClickTracks, that no report is really highly useful/actionable without segmenting it. A statement I heard repeated from you as well.

However; I think one should not see all reports as definitive conclusions, but also as starting points for further investigation – this meaning that one should cross-reference these with other metrics, getting results beyond the report itself.

My own attitude is. IF your tool can do real time segmentation and Cross referencing on multiple metrics or if it does something as fantastic as real VISITOR segmentation – the “top exit page” might not be as useless as indicated. I do agree however, that unless the above “techniques” applied – you have a report with little action.

..And some FUN statistics for you Avinash. Looking at the “most popular pages” on “ondemand.indextools.com” (we of course use analytics on the analytics tool itself) – the most popular report across ALL some 4000 clients is: “Last visitor Details” – Talk about a report which could seem useless by first sight. The “Top exit pages” is number 80+, so I think we can conclude that our clients agree with YOU. :-)

Cheers

Dennis R. Mortensen
COO, IndexTools

Avinash has an interesting post on his Occam’s Razor blog that talks about the importance of your top exit pages. Your exit pages are the pages where the users leave your website or blog and go somewhere else. There is a thing called a “session”. A session is triggered when a user enters your website and it lasts till the user remains on your website.

Although there could be myriad reasons why a user leaves your website, if you can study and figure out what page triggers the exodus the most, you can rectify the problem.

……

The scenario you describe at the end I do think of as Page Bounce Rate. Depending on your business it is of value especially if you look at it for Entry Pages. It is important to stress this is not “Exit Rate” of the page. It is the Bounce Rate of those who entered on the page, that can provide actionable insights (as you point out for example with landing pages).

If you use indexTools it is under: Navigation -> Bounce Rate -> Of All Visits -> By Entry Page Title.

If you use Google Analytics it is under: All Reports -> Content Optimization -> Navigational Analysis -> Entrance Bounce Rates.

Here’s some gratuitous eye candy (thanks to the kindness of Dennis Mortensen I have been playing with indexTools):

Entry Page Title Bounce Rate Report for the last few days (each pair of bars is a page):

Yes, I agree to to your point that this report is completely immaterial if you look at it from the aggregated level.

But, it would be of some use

a. If the web analytic vendor provides an option to customize this report to the pages that we would like to track.
b. We have identified the pages that we would like to track for in this report (These pages are ideally the structured experience pages as you have said like various stages of online application form, checkout process, structured interactive demo, decision making functions like narrowing down to the most relevant product etc)

Though the mother of this report would ideally be scenario analysis report or goal analysis report where in we define the structured flow/pages for measuring the drop out rate or leak in the funnel.

What are your views on single access page reports? Do you consider this as bounce rate report? Is there any industry benchmarh for single access pages for home page. Can we look at the performance of a landing page (single lead capture page) through the single access page report?

Noticed a StatMeter.com referral (monitoring your site - perhaps a “visitor exit page”?) over to Webmetricsguru.com a couple of days ago. Took a look and found your blog stats interesting.

Then I noticed your post today citing your StatMeter Visitor Exit Pages - cool post (which I commented on).

Think Visitor Exit Pages/Visitor Exit Rate on a blog post are worthless. Sometimes, for some pages I have used the Visits/Visitor Exits (in Surfaid) to get an abandonment rate - but that metric was worthless too - as it did not tell me who was exiting and why.

I agree with Avinash Kaushik - looking at your top exit pages as an indicator of where your losing visitors in the conversion process -does not tell you much - especially if your website is a blog.   Why are blogs problematic f…

http://www.webmetricsguru.com/2006/12/top_exit_pages_not_a_good_metr.html

This metric is particular usefull for sites that are trying to monetize traffic with banners/AdSense etc.:

The exit pages are the best pages to put advertisements on, since the visitor is ‘ready’ on your site and is willing to leave the site..