Bounce Rate vs Exit Rate: What's the Difference?

Bounce rate measures the percentage of visits where someone lands on a page and leaves without viewing any other page on the site - calculated against entrances to that page, and only counted when the page in question was the entry point.

Exit rate measures the percentage of sessions that ended on a specific page, regardless of how many other pages the visitor viewed beforehand - calculated against total pageviews of that page, whether it was the entry point or the fifth page someone visited.

The relationship between the two is one-directional: every bounce is technically an exit, since a bounced visitor did leave from that page, but the reverse isn't true - most exits are not bounces, since most exits happen on pages people reached after browsing elsewhere on the site first. That distinction changes what each metric actually diagnoses. A high bounce rate on a page signals a first-impression problem, since it's specifically measuring people who arrived and immediately decided not to explore further - useful for judging whether a landing or entry page is meeting the expectations that brought someone there. A high exit rate on a page, especially one deep in a funnel that most visitors reach only after engaging elsewhere, is less alarming by itself - it might just be a natural, expected end point, like a thank-you page - and only becomes a real concern when it's unexpectedly high on a page a visitor should logically continue past, like a step in the middle of a checkout flow.