Website exit survey template

Question 1

What is a website exit survey?

Answer

A website exit survey is a type of web survey that appears when a visitor is about to leave your website. Its goal is to help you understand why some visitors bounce and don’t convert and how you can improve your offer to fulfill their needs.

Website exit surveys are a great addition to analytics and tracking tools.

The tools will let you figure out your bounce and conversion rates, determine how your visitors interact with your website and obtain other quantitative data.

The surveys will let you add context to the data. They’ll enable your visitors to explain why they’re leaving your site. Did they not find what they were looking for? Did they dislike a particular aspect of your product? Or maybe they were put off by your website UX?

So, how do the webisite exit surveys work?

Website exit surveys rely on user activity monitoring and survey triggering options. Let’s explain how they work on Survicate’s example.

For desktop users, the website exit surveys trigger when a person moves the cursor above a certain line (20px below the top of the page)—or when a person moves the mouse quickly to the top of the page, where the exit button usually is.

On touch screen devices, website exit surveys appear when a visitor starts scrolling back to the top of the page. This behavior is usually a signal that the user wants to access the address bar.

Question 2

What are the benefits of website exit surveys?

Answer

They have high response rates. Exit intent surveys are usually short and easy to answer, plus they don’t require your visitors to open a separate tab.
They shed light on how to improve your website. If you gather enough feedback, you’ll know how to improve your site to match the visitors’ intent—which might let you reduce bounce rate and increase conversion rate.
They will help you improve your products and services. If many visitors don’t find what they were looking for on your site, maybe it’s time to think about expanding your offer?

However, keep in mind that website exit surveys have their cons, too:

They might be seen as intrusive. Surveys inevitably disrupt the process of browsing your site. Consider starting with the pages with the highest bounce rate instead of showing the surveys across your whole domain.
The website survey triggering is never perfectly accurate. Sometimes, a survey might appear when a customer isn’t actually leaving your site—but wants to get to the very top of your page or switch a tab, for example.

Results can be biased. Some churning visitors might see them as an opportunity to express their frustration. Still, angry visitors might leave valuable insights into how to improve your website experience.

Question 3

What are the website exit survey questions?

Answer

Let’s go through a few of the most common website exit survey questions:

Why are you leaving our site? This can be either an open-ended or a closed-ended question—however, a close-ended question will guarantee higher response rates since it takes less effort to answer.
What were you hoping to get from our page?
Did you find what you were looking for today?
Is there anything we could have done better?
Is there anything missing on this site?

These questions fit most website surveys and will give you the crucial insights: reasons for website abandonment and ideas for website and product improvements.

The first two questions appear in the website exit survey template above. Just click the “Send this survey” button above if they fit your needs!

You can also find more situation-specific questions in the “What are the website survey use cases?” section below.

Question 4

What are the website exit survey use cases?

Answer

Shopping cart abandonment survey

Up to 70% of shoppers abandon their carts. With exit surveys, e-commerce businesses can quickly understand what exactly stops their visitors from buying.

To ensure the survey only shows to people who added something to the cart, use URL-based targeting—more on that here.

‍Recommended questions:

"What made you stop shopping?"
"What would convince you to finish shopping?"
"Do you need any additional information to complete the purchase?"

Pricing abandonment survey

This survey is an equivalent of a shopping cart abandonment survey for SaaS businesses. The visitors often go through all the typical steps leading to conversion but drop out after seeing the pricing page.

A survey will help you discover what made them leave your site at this final stage. Of course, some people will say that your tool is too expensive for them, but you might learn that a few of them had other doubts or needed clarification.

‍Recommended questions:

"What prevented you from signing up?"
"Is our pricing clear to you?"
"Compared to similar solutions to know, are our prices are lower, higher, or about the same?"
"How much would you be willing to pay for the basic plan?"

Landing page bounce research

It’s always valuable to know how you can improve your landing pages’ conversion rates—especially if you’re allocating significant resources to them.

Landing pages are often used with ad campaigns, and for a good reason—ad-specific content usually reports higher conversion rates because the traffic is qualified. However, they also report higher bounce rates.

Finding out why people leave the page without taking the desired landing page actions will let you improve your offer and messaging, which can be worth a small fortune.

Maybe you oversimplified the page, and people need more information? Or perhaps your value proposition is not clear enough? You’ll find out just what you need with a website exit survey.

‍Recommended questions:

“Did you find what you were looking for on the page?”
"What else would you like to see on this page?"
"What prevented you from signing up?"
"What should we do to improve your experience?"

Lead generation

Exit surveys might be an effective lead generation tool.

Sometimes, visitors leave your website because they couldn’t find the information they were looking for, but they’re still interested in your products or services. In that case, they might want to be contacted with more details.

Maybe your visitor could use a selection of educational materials, or maybe they’d like a personalized product demo?

‍Recommended questions:

"Do you need additional information about our offer?"
"Would you like a consultant to contact you with a personalized offer?"

Question 5

What are the website exit survey best practices?

Answer

Keep it short

Ask just one or two questions that don’t require too much effort to answer. Leave longer surveys for your loyal customers—visitors that are about to leave might not feel like spending any more time on your site.

It’s best to lead with a close-ended question that lists possible bounce reasons and follow up with an open-ended question that lets the respondents express their opinion. This method will maximize your response rates while still allowing the users to speak in their own voices.

If you use Survicate, you don’t have to worry about the follow-up questions lowering your response rates. Even if some respondents give up on the open-ended question, Survicate will still count their answers.

Use targeting and segmentation options

Adjust survey messages based on the pages where a survey appears and visitor behavior:

When a situation is right, ask a question more specific than the universal “Why did you decide to leave the website?”. For example, if someone is abandoning the shopping cart, it might be better to ask “What made you quit shopping?” instead.
Display your surveys only on a few pages at a time—and not on every page of your website. You’ll avoid annoying your visitors.
Display the survey only to first-time website visitors. You don’t want to annoy a recurring visitor by constantly asking them why they’re leaving this time around!

Survicate targeting options make it possible to display your surveys exactly where and when you want.

Make the survey visible

Website exit surveys require extra effort to be noticeable. Forget about the pop-ups - for this survey type, set the survey widget to appear at the center of the screen. You can also set the website fade out to grab attention.

Just remember to make your survey easy to close if you don’t want to annoy your visitors!

Question 6

How do I create a website exit survey?

Answer

With Survicate, you can have your website exit survey up and running in just a couple of minutes.

Just click the button above the page (next to the template's preview) and sign up with your business email. By doing so, you're signing up for a Flexible account. You can use our tool for free until you collect 100 responses.

When setting up your survey, remember to choose the right triggers. Find the “Triggers” section on the “Target” tab of the survey creator. Under the option “When would you like to show the survey?” pick: “When the user is about to exit.”

If it’s your first time running a web survey with Survicate, you have to add the Survicate tracking code to your site (automatically via Google Tag Manager, Segment, or WordPress plugin, or by copying and pasting a line of code).

And that’s it! Now, sit back and wait for results to start flowing in.

You’ll be able to see all the answers and response breakdowns on a real-time analytics dashboard.

But the best way to see how website exit surveys work is to try them out yourself. Start running surveys with Survicate now!

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Website exit survey template

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All native integrations are
1-click and code-free

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Website exit survey template

What is a website exit survey?

What are the benefits of website exit surveys?

What are the website exit survey questions?

What are the website exit survey use cases?

What are the website exit survey best practices?

How do I create a website exit survey?

Large section heading

All native integrations are1-click and code-free

We’re here to support you along the way

We’re also there

All native integrations are
1-click and code-free

We’re here to support you 
along the way