Web Page Exit Ratios

The Web page exit ratio is the percentage of users who leave a Web site at that page. Use this measurement to improve your home page visitor retention rate.

Real-life case studies:

On one site that had a 70 kilobyte home page, log file research revealed that over half of the visitors bailed out before the first page finished loading.
Another site had a 40 kilobyte home page. A review of three months of log files revealed that the home page had a 30% exit ratio.

Every other page in the site was in the range of 32-35 kilobytes. The exits of those pages were in the region of 6-8%. So could a mere 5 kilobytes of download - one second of download time - produce such dramatic differences?

Yes! The researchers trimmed the home page down to roughly 34 kilobytes. Remarkably, it found the exit ratio fell immediately from 30% to 6-8% just because of one tiny second of download time!

Conclusion
Most Internet users will wait no longer than eight seconds, before leaving a Web page. Since the average Web backbone connection speed is 5 kilobits per second, home pages that are larger than 40 kilobytes (5 kilobits per second X 8 seconds) are at some risk of losing visitors.

Did you know...

Optimal download time for office users on a broadband connection is 3 seconds.

Source: Zona Research, Inc.

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