Well…this blog is about internet product management and I am a novice 
. And, you thought if ..arrghhh… ‘Quit Rate’ was something that made sense 
.
With all due respect to the Eric Pietersons and Avinash Kaushiks of Web Analytics, this is an humble attempt to look deeper into exit and bounce rates, and this Quit Rate thing was just incidental 
.I so much wanted to call it ‘Nihit’s Alpha’ or Nihit’s dual core Model , neverthelss, Quit Rate is not bad at all
Bounce rate, by definition is the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page. Exit rate on the other hand is “Exit Rate is the percentage of visitors that leave site from a given page based on the number of visits to that page“.
So, now if you see a sudden increase in the bounce rate, do you have a problem in hand . Yes, you sure have one…but what is it?
Let’s try to find it out.
But before that, one more time, for my sake ,let us recall some definitions:
Bounce rate= Bounce/Entrances where; entrances are direct landings to the page and out of those the ones you right away quit are bounces.
Exit rate = Exits/Page Views; no big deal here.
Now, Page Views = Entrances + Non entry visits as well
and Exits = Bounces + Non bounce exits.
So Quit Rate will be = Non entry visits (Page views – Entrances)/Non bounce exits (Exits – Bounces).
Hmm.. damn the formula but what the hell does it represent?
Good question, well…it gives you the rate of people who have ‘Quit’ the given page out of all the people who came on to this page from some or the other page of your site. So if you see a jump in this like the one you saw for Bounce rate….Yes we have a problem with your page. However if this is pretty much in shape, the problem is not with your PAGE but with the TRAFFIC. i.e., your page is good for the internal traffic but the external traffic is not good. In this case, possibly your Online Marketing team needs to spruce up their efforts to bring a better traffic.
Apart from this, there is a larger message here. It is that these numbers (Web Analytics’) make little sense when you look at them individually, however they weave a b’ful story once seen in tandem.
Special thanks to Swaroop in helping me come out with this analysis.
Abhishekj said
Very interesting stuff but bounce rates should be studied for various segments separately and you would be able to track what is the bounce rate for marketing traffic and what is bounce rate for search traffic and what is bounce rate for internal traffic and you will always see that bounce rate for marketing traffic is the highest and also can track changes there only and will hopefully not need another new analytic measure though the quit rate is a nice concept
Nihit Nirmal said
but, what is been covered by Quit Rate is anyways out of the definition of Bounce Rate. We are specifically talking about the people who are NOT landing on these pages.
So even if it makes sense to have classification of bounce rate…Quit Rate should still find takers
Sitashwa said
Interesting insights there …
it appears that while talking of Quit Rate, a premise is that the page under consideration is not a landing page per se. If that’s correct, how does the Online Marketing team come into the picture?
Plus, correct me if this is wrong – the Bounce Rate is also excluded … in which case, a high Quit Rate might not be such a bad thing after all. Maybe the page is designed in such a way that the user is prompted to move on to another page within the site …
It would be great to read a follow-up piece on how the effectiveness of Online Marketing can be improved given the parameters discussed in this write-up [:)]
Nihit Nirmal said
Sitashwa, if a user moves from a page to other within a site it is neither exit or bounce. Exit n bounce comes into play only if the user leaves your site altogether.
, though i liked the way u commented..’interesting insights’ and then the backlash 
as that is a readymade topic for my next blog 
However it seems my blog has not done a good job in explaining the concept well
Quit rate is a concept for Landing Page more than other pages.
Understand it this way, a bounce rate can be because of 2 reasons
One ,people who landed (by clicking a banner ad or typing the url of the page) on your page found a disconnect between why they came on your page and the call for action on the page. Also it can be, because your page is bad. Now if your page is bad it will be bad for the users landing as well as users coming from some other page of your site. Now Quit rate discounts the landings and the bounces (exits where you had just one page visit, i.e. you landed and u left the site right away).
So if your Quit rate has not spiked, it means that people coming on to the given page from some other page (within your site) are fine with it.
So the worry is that other people, the one who are landing, are finding a disconnect.
Would refrain from answering the other part of your question
Hope I have done a slightly better job this time