diberry - 5:08 pm on Jun 26, 2012 (gmt 0)

I don't have Analytics, and I'm not sure what in my stats package would correspond to Exit Rate, but I do know this. My most popular entrance pages are also my most popular exit pages. But when I examine these pages to see where the exiting visitors come from, I often see absolutely nothing but StumbleUpon as that source of traffic.

This makes sense, because in SU's environment, clicking around on a site kind of takes you out of the "stumbling" loop. So instead I look at how many Stumblers subscribe to the site, and it's a decent number. They're planning to come back when they're not in the stumble loop.

What exactly does Exit Rate measure?

Because without understanding what brought the visitor to your site, it's not necessarily very helpful. It depends how sticky your site is meant to be.

There's another reason why sometimes your most popular entrance pages are your most popular exit pages, and that's because people are bouncing around your most popular pages (assuming you have these highlighted somewhere) and THEN leaving. They aren't actually exiting from the same page they landed on, and that makes a big difference to how I estimate their satisfaction. I figure that's a happy visitor.

So again, just how is Exit Rate determined? I think that's what I'm just not understanding here.