Looking to improve
your customer's experience online? In order to successfully improve a
customer's experience on your company's website you must first know what sort
of experience they are having. How is a customer entering, traveling through
and perhaps most importantly exiting your site?
The web analytics exit page metric
characterizes "the last page on a site accessed during a visit which
identified the end of a visit or session" (Reed College of Media, 2014).
Everyone who visits a site is at a point going to leave. Good web design leads
a user through a series of pages to deliver the information or action being
sought by both consumer and business. A well-designed site therefore would have
pages with both high exit page ratios (i.e. receipt and thank you pages) and
low exit page ratios (i.e. home page).
Exit page is often
confused with bounce rate. So let's be clear: "Exit Rate shows the
percentage of people who entered anywhere on the site but exited from a
particular page. Bounce rate shows the percentage of people who entered on a
particular page, did nothing, and exited from the site on the same page"
(Kaushik, 2010). In web analytics, the exit page can tell if a consumer has had
the experience intended for them after visiting a site for a particular purpose
(i.e. making a purchase, answering a question, ordering a pizza).
ProPublica, during
the 2012 election, created a news application called Free the Files entirely
focused on optimizing the exit page metric with what they labeled as
"Casino-Driven Design". According to Shaw (2013), "Casino-driven
design cuts away all distraction and drives the user's attention toward staying
focused on a single task. Casino-driven design creates an optimal atmosphere
for task completion by actively discouraging cross-site exploration and page
exits". In the case of Free the Files, the task was to analyze and
transcribe millions of invoices and files in to clean data for clearer insight
in TV ad spending by campaigns.
Source: Shaw, Al.
(2013, March 20) ProPublica Nerd Blog
Beyond a clean page
with no section links, backlinks to the homepage, ads or other
"distracting" elements; ProPublica's casino-driven design begins with
a 'glass door' technique revealing what activities are available once you sign
up. Once a user signed-up, wayfinding banners with encouragement and direction
appeared at the top of each page directing the user to their next action.
ProPublica's
casino-driven design efforts are a great example of optimizing the Exit Page
metric. The Exit Page report in Google Analytics offers a direct view of key
pages to look at in optimizing your
company's site for better performance. If user's are exiting from a page that
is meant to lead to another action, ask yourself what elements on the page can
be improved to lead them there.
- Does it offer mediocre copywriting?
- Is it clear what the user's next step (or click) should be?
- Is it slow to load or require a lot of scrolling?
- Is it dull and unengaging?
If the primary exit
page is your thank you page after checkout, give your web developer a holiday
bonus as when users are reaching the exit page intended for them your business
goals are being met.
References
Kaushik,
A. (2010). Web analytics 2.0: The art of online accountability &
science of customer centricity.Indianapolis,
IN: Wiley Publishing. ISBN# 978-0470529393
Reed College of
Media. (2014). Basic web analytics.
Shaw, Al. (2013,
March 20). No windows one exit free drinks: casino-driven design for
crowdsourcing [Blog Post]. ProPublica. Retrieved
from http://www.propublica.org/nerds/item/casino-driven-design
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