Blaming the wrong page

Blaming the wrong page

An e-commerce store saw a scary exit rate on their shipping-info page and assumed it was scaring buyers off. They drafted a rewrite.

The clue was the difference between exit rate and bounce rate. The page had a high exit rate but a tiny bounce rate — almost nobody landed there cold. People reached it deep in a session, got their answer, and left satisfied, often after ordering. It was an endpoint, not a leak.

The real leak was a category page with a 74% bounce rate that they'd never flagged, because its exit rate looked unremarkable.

They left shipping alone and fixed the category page's broken filters. Bounce there fell from 74% to 51%, and category-to-product clicks rose 33%.

The lesson: exit rate counts where sessions end; bounce rate counts where they die on arrival. Confuse them and you'll renovate the wrong room.