How Can I Find Where Visitors Are Leaving My Web Site?

Your exit page is the place where visitors leave your web site. This is where users either finish the path you wanted them to follow, or didn’t find what they were looking for and went elsewhere.

Knowing your exit page(s) helps you evaluate how to improve your site, making it more valuable to your readers. Find this information using one of the many web log analysis tools out there. Chances are your web host includes this for free in your web hosting package. Check with them first.

Another popular choice is Google analytics, although you need to place their code within each page you track.

I’m using AWStats, a free log file analyzer that runs on our web server. It also has the ability to export reports to XML, text, and PDF, and report on 404 (missing) pages and the referrers for them.

For beginners to web analytics, a great book to start with is Web Analytics 2.0. This highly-rated work gives practical steps for tracking your web performance and gaining more insight into your visitors.