An exit page is the last page a visitor viewed in a session before leaving your site. Every session that ends has one, so the useful question is not whether a page has exits but whether people leave it at a point where you wanted them to carry on.
How exit pages work
GA4 counts an exit against the page or screen on which the last event of a session happened, in a metric called Exits. It is not part of the standard reports out of the box, but it is available in explorations, where you can set Page path against Views and Exits.
Exit rate, the share of a page’s views that were the last in their session, is not a ready-made GA4 metric. You can work it out as exits divided by views, either in a spreadsheet or as a calculated field in Looker Studio.
Exits and bounces are easily confused:
- A bounce, in GA4, is a session that was not engaged: 10 seconds or less, a single page and no key event.
- An exit is simply the last page of any session, however long or engaged that session was.
A visitor who reads three guides, requests a quote and then leaves from the thank-you page has an exit on the thank-you page and no bounce at all, because it was an engaged session.
Why it matters
Exits show where journeys end, which is valuable on pages that sit in the middle of a journey. On a UK online shop, a high share of exits from the basket or the delivery options page often points to a surprise: the delivery charge, a missing payment method or a minimum order. On a service site, heavy exits from a pricing page can mean the prices, or the absence of them, are putting people off. On a multi-step booking form, exits on step two point to a specific question.
On many other pages, a high exit rate is fine. A contact page where visitors copy the phone number, a blog post that answered the question, an opening hours page: people leave because they got what they came for. Judging these pages by exits leads to the wrong fixes.
Common mistakes
- Treating every high exit rate as a problem. Thank-you pages, contact pages and answer pages naturally have high exit rates.
- Missing the action before the exit. A visitor who taps the phone number and leaves looks like a plain exit. Track phone, email and WhatsApp taps as events so you can see which exits followed an enquiry.
- Reacting to small numbers. An 80% exit rate on 15 views is noise, not a finding.
- Reaching straight for an exit-intent popup. A popup offering a discount treats the symptom. Find out why people leave before deciding how to keep them.
- Comparing with Universal Analytics. GA4 defines sessions differently, so older exit rates are not a fair baseline.
How to act on it
- Build a free-form exploration with Page path as rows and Views and Exits as values. Add Device category, because mobile and desktop exits often differ.
- Work out exit rate for the pages that should lead somewhere: basket, checkout steps, pricing, service pages and booking forms.
- Pick the few pages where exits are high and traffic is meaningful, and watch what happens on them. Session recordings and scroll maps show where visitors stop.
- Use a path exploration to see what visitors did just before reaching those pages.
- Change one thing at a time, and compare exit rate and key events before and after.
Finding the points where paid visitors give up is a large part of building landing pages for ads that turn clicks into enquiries.