How exit intent works
A small script watches the mouse pointer. When the cursor accelerates upwards and crosses the top edge of the browser window — the direction someone moves in to reach the tab strip, the address bar or the close button — the script treats that as an intention to leave and fires whatever has been attached to the trigger, usually an overlay. Some implementations also listen for rapid back-button behaviour or a long idle period, but the cursor movement is the core signal.
That signal is a guess, not a fact. The visitor may be reaching for a bookmark, switching to another tab to check something, or simply moving the mouse out of the way. Exit intent detects a movement pattern that often precedes leaving; it cannot detect a decision.
Why exit intent matters
Its appeal is timing. An overlay that appears immediately interrupts someone who is still reading, while an exit-intent overlay only appears at a moment when the alternative was losing the visit entirely. Nothing is taken away from a session that was ending anyway, which is why it tends to annoy fewer people than a timed pop-up showing the same offer.
The serious limitation is that it depends on a mouse. Touch devices have no cursor and no top edge to cross, so on phones the trigger either never fires or is replaced by cruder substitutes such as scroll direction or a back-button intercept, which are far less reliable and much more irritating. For sites where most traffic arrives on a phone — which is the normal picture in Nepal and across much of South Asia — exit intent is a desktop-only tactic and should be budgeted as one.
Common mistakes with exit intent
Treating it as a fix for a weak page is the big one. If people are leaving because the offer is unclear or the price is hidden, catching them on the way out with a discount does not repair the page, it just buys a smaller number of worse leads while the underlying problem stays.
Firing on every page is the second. An exit-intent overlay on a contact page or a checkout interrupts someone who was about to convert. The third is showing it repeatedly to the same person; without a cookie or frequency cap, a returning reader meets the same interruption every visit and stops coming back.
How to act on it
Decide first whether the page deserves an interruption at all. Blog posts and guides are reasonable candidates, because the visitor came for information and may accept an offer of more of it. Product, pricing and enquiry pages generally are not. Whatever you show should be worth the interruption on its own terms — a genuinely useful resource beats a generic newsletter box.
Then set the rules before you turn it on: exclude converted visitors, cap how often it appears, and make the close control obvious and large enough to hit. Measure the effect on the whole page rather than the overlay alone, since an overlay can report opt-ins while total enquiries fall. If you are already running a pop-up or modal elsewhere in the journey, pick one and remove the other, and treat both as part of ordinary conversion rate optimisation rather than a separate trick.