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According to Google Analytics, a particular page has 97710 page views. This page has an exit rate of 57.82% and a bounce rate of 64.4%. According to the Navigation Summary page, 91.76% of page visits were entrances, and 8.24% came from previous pages.

From the page views and entrance rate, I calculate the number of direct entrances as:

.9176 * 97710 = 89659

and from that, I calculate the number of bounces as:

.644 * 89659 = 57740

This seems reasonable. Then, from the exit rate and the number of page views, I calculate the number of exits as:

.5782 * 97710 = 56496

This too seems like a reasonable number...but then I saw that the number of bounces (57740) > the number of total exits (56496)!

I've read about what exactly bounce rate and exit rate are, and I've looked at a few examples online where people showed examples of how to calculate bounce and exit rates. Does anyone see anything wrong with my math? Or do I misunderstand how Analytics works?

1 Answer 1

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the data is correct, your math is too. the only difference on why you get a discrepancy of 1244 is because you are calculating with only 2 decimal numbers.

if for example your "real" bounce rate is 91.7653% (and not 91.76% flat) that would result in 89659 direct entrances

.917653 * 97710 = 89663
.644353 * 89663 = 57774
and so forth

also your total exit rate can be smaller than your bounce rate. for example visitors could time out on your site and hence a new session is made without accounting for an exit ...

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  • Hey, no problem. Glad to have helped ...
    – David K.
    Aug 4, 2011 at 11:20
  • This doesn't make sense, increasing the decimal places doesn't account for that big a discrepancy. The highest the exit rate can be would be about 56,500.
    – cjk
    Jun 13, 2012 at 9:05
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    well analytics cannot be used for exact number crunching. there are many factors to consider: overlapping sessions in his measured timeframe, timeouts, performance issues, etc. his calculation is correct and the small discrepancy of several hundred is too small to account for a faulty implementation or mathematical error. also a bounce and an exit are different metrics and exit rates can in fact be smaller than bounce rates, due to timeouts, etc.
    – David K.
    Jun 14, 2012 at 11:04

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