Exit click metrics

What you quickly learn in internet advertising is that an audience’s attention span is very low, and always fleeting. Even if you’re successful in making a conversion with a customer they’ll quickly leave your site right after. But this isn’t necessarily a bad thing; depending on the exit path they take and what industry your company is in, some of those exits can be measured and intuitively applied as a goal in your advertising campaign.

There are a few different types of exits a visitor can take. First, there are the oh-so-good exit clicks. These happen when visitors exit your site through links you have provided on your Web site, or when they reach the end page or thank you page after a conversion. Providing external links on your Web site may just be a natural way your company does business or the link will provide extra incentive to make an action on your own Web site. Measuring these exit clicks can be a basis for parts of your campaign, and they can be measured either by implementing a redirecting link or a Java script on the link. Depending on your business, a higher amount of exit clicks could potentially be better.
Another exit path is called the exit rate or exit percentage, where a visitor closes the browser with your Web site loaded or navigates away from the Web site via the URL bar, a search bar or their bookmarks.

The last and ugliest of the exits is called the bounce rate, more known as the stepchild of exit paths that no one wishes to have. Bounce rates occur when the visitor clicks the “back” button from your Web site, which amounts to a lost conversion opportunity after they’ve landed on your page. What’s worse is that for search marketers, when the visitor hits the “back” button, they’re right back to the search engines results page where there are a plethora of other competitor’s Web sites with the opportunity to steal your conversion. Ouch indeed.

Another reason why measuring exit clicks may be important is to measure the success of click arbitrage on a Web site. Click arbitrage is when a publisher buys paid search ads to direct to their landing page, and then have similar contextual ads on their own page that bid for a slightly higher price. Here, one would naturally want a 100 percent exit click rate.

Measuring exit clicks is often overlooked, yet can be very beneficial to a company if applied correctly to their marketing campaign. Although it certainly isn’t for everyone, it’s definitely something worth looking into.