What Is Exit Rate? How It's Counted and Read

Counting Exits on One Page

An exit is when a page is the last one a shopper sees. Maybe they close the tab or head off to another site. Or the visit just times out. Exit rate takes those exits and turns them into a share of all the views that page got. Older Universal Analytics reports called it “% Exit”.

Exit rate = exits from the page ÷ views of the page × 100

Here’s one week at a small coffee bean store:

Page	Views	Exits	Exit rate
Home page	5,000	1,000	20%
Light roast product page	2,400	960	40%
Shipping and returns page	600	390	65%

For the home page, 1,000 ÷ 5,000 = 20%. The product page works out to 960 ÷ 2,400 = 40%, and shipping comes in at 390 ÷ 600 = 65%. So the shipping page looks like the weak spot. But someone checking shipping costs is at least thinking about ordering. Maybe the delivery fee put them off. Or they got their answer and left to think it over. The 65% can’t tell you which it was.

Where Shopify Owners Find Exit Rate

You’ll usually get page-by-page exit rate from a web analytics tool like Google Analytics. Pull the exits and views for each page, then divide.

Shopify Analytics gives you a related, store-wide picture. Its conversion breakdown shows how many sessions added to cart, reached checkout and completed checkout. The loss between two of those steps is your drop-off rate. Drop-off points you to a stage of the visit. Exit rate gets you down to a single page.

Why a High Exit Rate Can Be Fine

Each visit ends on exactly one page, so you can’t avoid exits. What you really want to know is whether a page loses people before it’s done its job.

Some pages are meant to be last. An order confirmation page will show lots of exits. So will a blog post that answers someone’s question. That’s the page working.
Small numbers swing hard. A page with 5 views and 4 exits shows 80%, which tells you almost nothing.
Traffic mix moves it. If an ad sends a lot of first-time visitors to one page, its exit rate can climb even though the page hasn’t changed.
It never tells you why. A high price, a slow page, a missing size and plain window shopping all look the same in the number.

It helps to look at the whole store too. In our visitor data from 958 Shopify stores, only about 8 of every 100 sessions reached the cart. So most visits end somewhere before the cart, and a product page with plenty of exits is expected. It isn’t broken by default. That figure describes those stores, though, so don’t read it as a target for yours. If lots of visits across your whole store leave without buying, start with our guide to why Shopify traffic leaves without buying.

Exit Rate Is Not Bounce Rate

People mix these two up a lot. Bounce rate looks at visits that leave from the page they landed on without doing anything else. Exit rate counts every visit that ends on a page, even one that saw ten pages first. So every bounce counts as an exit too. Not every exit is a bounce, though.

It’s not the same as exit intent either. That’s a live signal that someone’s about to leave, like the mouse heading toward the browser tabs. Exit rate only gets counted after the visit is over.