You might have looked at how many people are visiting your website, but do you also pay attention to how many are leaving?
Using Google Analytics to find out where people leave
Google Analytics can give you insight into where people are leaving your website, and you can then do a bit of detective work to try and work out why that might be. Here’s three metrics to look at.
Related blog: Learn how to set up Google Analytics
1) Exit pages
Go to ‘Behaviour > Site Content > All Pages’ and click on the ‘Exit %’ column to see the pages where people are most frequently leaving your website.
Make a list of these pages, remembering to disregard any where people leaving is the desired result, for example Purchase Confirmation pages.
2) Time on site
The next column to look at is time on site. Click the ‘Avg. Time on Site’ column twice to see the pages that have the least time spent on them. Again, for some pages this won’t be an issue, such as login pages where the intention is that people move on quickly.
Add to your list the pages that have a lower than expected time spent on them.
Tip: Depending on the size of your site, it may be easier to export this data to a spreadsheet so you can easily sort to see the pages affected. To do this, click on ‘Export’ at the top of the page.
3) Bounce rate
Finally, double click on the ‘Bounce Rate’ column to show pages with a high bounce rate. The bounce rate is the percentage of people that leave the site without viewing another page. Pages with a high bounce rate are an indication that the content is not what they expected.
Why are people leaving my website?
Once you’ve created your list of poorly performing pages, you can start to investigate to see why people might be leaving. Review your pages and see if it might be one of these common reasons…
1) The content isn’t what they expected
Does your page title and meta description accurately reflect the content of your page? Look where people are coming from and try to identify why they might not be finding what they’re looking for on your page.
2) The design is off-putting
If you have high bounce rates across your site, it could be that an outdated design is putting people off. Research by the University of Northumbria found that when people didn’t trust a website, 94% of time it was because of poor or outdated design.
3) It’s not clear where to go next
Finally, people might be leaving just because they can’t find the next step they want to take – always ensure your call to action is visible and clear – whether that’s purchasing a product, getting in touch or signing up to your email newsletter.
