In one way I whole heartedly agree with your musings and Stephen’s approach, in another way I disagree.

The reason for my disagreeing with the value of the exit page report is that in some cases we are not looking for causal factors but rather we are looking for descriptive statistics that guide our future investigation of the site.
If the exit pages report shows that a particular page is “high” in terms of visitors exiting the site, then this gives me a cause to review this page to see why. In the event that we find some factors such as the page has links to other sites, links to a site that we don’t currently collect data for or some other factor that prompts the visitor to terminate their session, then I can either track these events. They may not be causal, however such a report does give me a view in terms of determining the top pages where a visitor leaves and this gives me a short list of which pages I should review.

Ultimately web analytics on its own is not going to make the decision for me, as an analyst, it is me that makes the recommendation and the client that makes the decision. Without the tools to assess all the values then we are partially in the dark; regardless of the “usefulness” of the actual value of the report in a probabilistic view.

Like always just my 2 cents worth…

Wishing you well with your new venture!

Rod

PS whilst I like the link approach of Dennis R. Mortesen, I hope to add a more than a little value on the way

The fun part of writing, linking and participating in the web analytics blogosphere (if there is such a thing) - is that one KNOW that fellow bloggers pick up on a referring URL, keywords or any other data trail left out there..

So Heinekens are on ME next time!!

… and of course, with “The Dirty Secrets of Web Analytics” – we (the vendors) would not want you to be sober starting that session

Cheers and see you in San Jose.

Dennis R. Mortensen, COO at IndexTools
http://visualrevenue.com/blog