What Is Bounce Rate vs Exit Rate?

Bounce rate is the percentage of sessions that viewed only one page before leaving. Exit rate is the percentage of views of a specific page that were the last page in the session. They sound interchangeable but answer different questions — bounce is about whole single-page visits; exit is about a page being the final step of a longer journey.

The precise definitions

• Bounce rate is a property of sessions. A bounce is a session with a single pageview and no further interaction. Bounce rate is bounces ÷ total sessions. It's usually quoted for an entry page: "of everyone who landed here, what share left without going anywhere?"
• Exit rate is a property of a page. For a given page, it's the number of sessions that ended on that page ÷ the total number of sessions that viewed that page — no matter how many pages they saw first.

The key relationship: every bounce is also an exit, but most exits are not bounces. A bounce is the special case where the exit page was also the only page.

A worked example

Imagine a pricing page viewed in three sessions:

Session	Path	Pricing page role
A	landed on /pricing, left	bounce (and an exit)
B	/ → /pricing, left	exit, not a bounce
C	/ → /pricing → /signup	neither — they continued

For the pricing page:

• Exit rate = sessions that ended on /pricing ÷ sessions that viewed it = 2 (A, B) ÷ 3 = 67%.
• Bounce contribution = only session A was a single-page bounce.

So /pricing has a high exit rate (people often leave there) but only one of those was a bounce. If you only looked at bounce rate, you'd miss that two of three visitors are leaving at pricing — a clear drop-off worth investigating.

When to use which

• Bounce rate → entry pages. It tells you whether a landing page gives people a reason to go deeper. High bounce on a homepage that's meant to start a journey is a problem; high bounce on a glossary post that answers one question is fine.
• Exit rate → journey steps. It tells you where people leave a multi-step flow. High exit on a "thank you" page is expected; high exit on the pricing page before checkout is a leak.

Using the wrong one leads to wrong conclusions: judging your checkout-flow pages by bounce rate (most aren't entry pages) tells you almost nothing.

Measuring exit-prone pages

A simple way to find pages people leave from is to look at where sessions end. In PostHog you can capture the picture with the native web analytics, or reason about it from $pageview and $pageleave events. The conceptual move is the same: bounce isolates single-page sessions; exit isolates the last page of any session.

The takeaway

Bounce rate and exit rate aren't competing metrics — they're answers to different questions. Reach for bounce when you're judging an entry page, and exit when you're hunting for the step where a journey breaks. For where that journey-level drop-off fits, see what a conversion funnel is. And if you'd like the leak found and the fix shipped as a Pull Request, that's what Velyr does.