Unusually high home page exit rate

20% exits have no referrer?

[hairycoo]

I'm using ClickTracks and I've done some home page analysis. The results are shocking, to me at least.

1675 home page visits

1441 home page exits (86% of all home page visits):

74.6% of exits came from images.google.com
20.7% of exits have no referer

Given that the home page ranks #1 for some popular images.google.com searches, the results are not that surprising. People look at the image and leave.

It's the high percentage of people who have NO referer that I have a problem understanding. A fifth of all exits have no referer? How am I supposed to find out what makes them leave if I can't find out anything about them?

Some details about the homepage:

* Size (HTML+images) 9kb
* Top navigation bar has a single link to the one subcategory of the site.
* 2 paragraphs of text+1 picture in the body of the page describing the contents of the subcategory+ one more link to it.

I'm building the site from the bottom of the pyramid to the top. E.g. I'm building each subcategory properly (hundreds of pages) one by one instead of listing all 6 of them in order to develop them later.

Any ideas?

[BradleyT]

Perhaps thats bookmark users who are looking for updated info else they leave. I do that on a lot of blog sites I have bookmarked.

We just bought CT Pro on Friday, I'll take a look on Monday and post what kind of no referrer exit % we have on some pages.

[cgrantski]

Chances are pretty good that a lot of the visits without a referrer are other sites with links to your site that open in a new browser window (a self-defense tactic for the other sites so that their site remains underneath). If these visitors are using IE or several other browsers, the referrer will not be logged. Some browsers WILL record the referrer under these circumstances. You can get a more correct idea of your referrers if you isolate the traffic from those kinds of browsers and look at the proportions there. No-referrer visits will be down, and the true sources of the traffic will be up.

Having said that, I completely forget which browsers will transmit referrer information in a new browser window situation. When I get to the office I will look it up, or somebody here will post the right info.

[Kevin French]

Without seeing your site, I would assume 1 of 2 things.

1. They are direct nav visitors (bookmark or typing your domain directly into the address bar) who are looking for new content and they are not seeing any of interest.

2. You purchased a domian that was previously owned and used for an entirely different purpose.

[ken_b]

1675 home page visits
1441 home page exits (86% of all home page visits):

Are you checking to see if any of those visitors went from the home page to an internal sub-page and then returned to the home page and then left the site from there?

I do that fairly often, I'll look at the home page again to see if there's anything else I want to explore, and if not leave.

Also visitors that enter via a sub-page might be going to the home page and then leaving.

The result is that what might look like a pretty high number of single page visits might not be what it looks like on the surface.

[hairycoo]

According to ClickTracks only 2.9% of all home page visits (and 1.6% of all home page exits) have as "previous page" the subcategory homepage (which at the moment is the real gateway to the 200+ content pages).

I don't have a home button in my main or secondary navigation bar, only in the crumbs menu which is stuck to the very top left of the screen.

It's highly unlikely that the domain was used previously, it's quite brandable and unique. It's a content site and it would make sense for people to bookmark it but it seems strange

a) to bookmark the homepage when so few go to it from inside pages (since it really doesn't rank for anything yet) and

b) that the daily number is so high (on the 18th it was 137 exits out of 151 home page visits)

The software also says:

Average time at this page:
43 secs for visitors labeled Home page visits
57 secs for visitors labeled Home page exits

Average time to this page (time before they reach the page):
18 secs for visitors labeled Home page visits
12 secs for visitors labeled Home page exits

Something just doesn't add up. What other explanation could there be? Could Clicktracks be completely off the mark here? I'm also tracking the site with Google's Urchin but will have to wait for some relevant data to come in to see if the results are the same.

Thanks everyone for your replies

[Adam_T]

Well, have used CT for several years, and though I feel the exit figures are quite sound, I do sometimes find the visit duration figures questionable. I don't think its the most statistically accurate tracking prpgram out there, we use it primarily for the 'overlay' function.

Ideally for us we would want to acheive H/P exit rates of below 10-15%. Uusually find we average around 18 - 20%

Check your exclusions and dynamic page parameters, it sounds like page types may be getting tagged incorrectly or some pages ignored? 80 odd % definetly sounds like an error somewhere to me.

[Receptional Andy]

links to your site that open in a new browser window...If these visitors are using IE or several other browsers, the referrer will not be logged

IE6 still records the referrer for new windows - the new window shouldn't make any difference regardless of the browser. I don't know if this was the case with older IE versions.

[hairycoo]

The site is completely static, pure HTML