I've been hearing a lot of talk lately of bounce rates, exit rates, puke factors, bail-outs, etc.  If you're confused like I was trying to figure them all out, then read on...

The first thing that will help is to understand how time spent on page is calculated in most web analytics tools. When a page is visited, a time-stamp is written in the browser's cookie to identify when the session began. When the next page is visited, another time-stamp is written in the browser's cookie. If a visitor visits one page on your site and leaves, most web analytics tools will not know how long they spent on that page.

Understanding time spent on page is crucial because one way of measuring the bounce rate is by the percentage of "short" page views. "Short" being defined by page views less than a set time, such as five seconds.  Measuring bounce rate like this is not relevant in most cases.  We're limited to counting pages in visits rather than keeping time.

Exit Rate:  The percentage of visits including the selected page in which this was the last page visited.

Soft Bounce Rate:  The percentage of multiple page visits in which the selected page was the last page visited.

Hard Bounce Rate:  The percentage of visits including the selected page in which this was the only page visited.

Note:  Exit Rate = Soft Bounce Rate + Hard Bounce Rate

For Omniture users:

Surprisingly, these are not readily available in Omniture and require some tricks to find.  Fortunately, there is a feature called the "calculated metric".  Following are instruction on how to set these up as calculated metrics in Omniture:

Note before you begin:  You will need to set these up in each report suite that you use.  :(

• Open the Traffic > Segmentation > Most Popular Pages report.
• Click on the metric that appears underlined and in bold after the word "showing" on the upper-right corner.  This will open a window in which other metrics may be selected.
• Click on the "calculated" tab.
• Click the "Define New Metric" button.
• In the new window, name your metric accordingly.
• Select "Percentage" in the upper-right corner.
• You may also define the number of decimal places.
  
• You will be using the "standard metrics" in the left column to build your calculated metric.  Here are the calculations for the metrics presented:
• Exit Rate:  [exits] / [visits]
• Soft Bounce Rate:  ( [exits] - [single access] ) / ( [visits] - [single access] )
  
• Hard Bounce Rate:  [single access] / [entries]