Page Quality Metrics
Zenovay has three quality metrics per page: bounce rate, exit rate, and median time on page. They look similar but answer different questions. You see them when you hover a row on the Pages card of your domain's Analytics tab (Domains → your site → Analytics):
- Exit rate and median time on page appear on the Page tab, together with the page's visits.
- Bounce rate appears on the Entry Page tab. A page's bounce rate counts the visits that started on that page, so it belongs to the entry page.
Bounce rate per landing page, split by channel or device, is also in the Retention tab under Bounce. See Cohort Bounce.
Quick comparison
| Metric | Question it answers | Range |
|---|---|---|
| Bounce rate | Of the visits that started on this page, what share viewed no other page? | 0-100% |
| Exit rate | Of the page views of this page, what share were the last page view of their visit? | 0-100% |
| Median time on page | How long does a typical visitor spend on this page before navigating? | seconds |
A visit that starts on /pricing and views no other page counts toward both the bounce rate and the exit rate of /pricing. A visit that starts on /blog, then moves on to /pricing and ends there counts toward the exit rate of /pricing only. It does not touch the bounce rate of /pricing, because a page's bounce rate only looks at visits that started on that page. For /blog, it is an entry that did not bounce.
How Zenovay computes them
Zenovay computes these metrics for the period you select, from the page views of real visits. Bot traffic is left out.
- Bounce rate =
(visits that started on this page and viewed no other page) / (all visits that started on this page) × 100 - Exit rate =
(page views of this page that were the last page view of their visit) / (all page views of this page) × 100 - Median time on page = the median of the time from a page view of this page to the next page view of the same visit
The median (rather than the mean) keeps idle tabs and other outliers from skewing the value.
The last page view of a visit has no measurable time on page, because no next page view follows it, so it is left out of the median. A one-page visit therefore adds nothing to the median, and a page that is only ever the last page of its visits shows no median time on page.
A bounce is a visit with exactly one page view, the same rule as the site-wide bounce rate on the dashboard. A page view is every page load or reload, every route change in a single-page app, and a page restored from the browser's back/forward cache; a change of only the #hash is not a page view. Nothing else counts: time on page, scrolling, clicks, form submits and custom events do not turn a one-page visit into a non-bounce, and a visit with two page views is never a bounce, however short.
Reading the Pages card
Hover any row on the Page tab of the Pages card. The popover shows the page's Page views, its Visits (the visits that viewed it), its Exit rate and, when it can be measured, its Median time on page.
The Entry Page tab lists the page each visit started on, counted in visits, and now also shows the Bounce rate of each entry page when you hover its row. Over all entry pages, the visits and the bounced visits add up to the visits and the bounce rate of the whole site. To look at the visits behind a row, hover it and click the filter icon (Filter by this value): the filter "Entry page is …" selects exactly the visits that started on that page.
For bounce rate per landing page split by channel or device, open Retention → Bounce. Its cells are coloured from pale (low) to deep red (high), next to a ranked list of your biggest bounce leaks. Retention is a Pro feature. See Cohort Bounce.
When bounce rate isn't bad
A high bounce rate isn't automatically a problem:
- Single-purpose pages (a recipe, a phone number, a status page): visitors land, get the answer, and leave. High bounce ≠ bad UX.
- Top-of-funnel content with strong CTAs: bounces here usually mean copy or load-time problems.
- Authenticated app pages: these should have very low bounce rates.
Median time on page cannot tell you whether one-page visits read the page: a bounced visit has a single page view, and the last page view of a visit has no measurable time. To judge that, look at the page's Scroll Depth, which covers every page view, one-page visits included. A 90% bounce rate on a page that most page views read to the end usually means visitors found what they came for; a 90% bounce rate where few page views get past 25% is a problem.
When exit rate matters most
Exit rate is the metric you watch on conversion-critical pages: checkout, signup, pricing, contact. A spike in exit rate on /checkout is one of the strongest leading indicators of revenue impact.
Related
On this page