The Pages report includes a few columns that will help you understand how visitors navigate your website. These columns are:
- Entrances
- Exits
- Exit Rate
These columns are not visible by default and can be enabled via the columns toggle option.
Entrances tell you how many times a page was the first page in a session.
Exits tell you how many times a page was the last page in a session.
Exit Rate tells you how often a page was the last page in a session whenever it’s viewed.
To make things clearer, let’s consider an example. Imagine someone visits your site and they view the following three pages in this order:
- Page A
- Page B
- Page C
In your Pages report, all three pages would have 1 view. Page A would have 1 Entrance, while the others would have zero. Likewise, Page C would have 1 Exit, while the other pages would have none.
Entrance pages are often referred to as landing pages.
While entrances and exits are intuitive, the Exit Rate is a bit more complicated. If this was the only recorded session, Page C would have an Exit Rate of 100% because it’s the last page visitors view before leaving your site 100% of the time it’s viewed.
Now, let’s say a second visitor arrives and views the following pages:
- Page B
- Page A
Page A would have an Exit Rate of 50% because it’s the exit page 50% of the time it’s viewed. Page C would still have an Exit Rate of 100% because it’s the last page viewed 100% of the time it’s viewed.
In other words, Exit Rate tells you how often a page is the exit page when it’s viewed, not how often it’s the exit page when the site is viewed.
How to find insights with these columns
In practice, you can use the Entrances column to find pages that bring the most visitors to your website and the Exits column to find the pages where visitors leave most often.
Since popular pages will naturally have more exits, you can use the Exit Rate column to find pages where visitors are more likely than usual to leave your website.