jQuery Exit Intent Plugin

The jQuery Exit Intent plugin try to anticipate when the user is about to leave the current page, and fire an event when it thinks they are doing so. You can react to this event to display modal dialogues, change page text, etc., to try to grab user's attention and (hopefully) made them change their minds.

Requirements

1. jQuery >= 1.4

Installation

1. Download the plugin

2. Include the following line after jQuery:

    <script src="jquery.exitintent.min.js"></script>
   

   NB: adjust the path as necessary

3. Enable the plugin in your site:

    $.exitIntent('enable');
   

4. Listen to the exitintent event, and act accordingly:

    $(document).bind('exitintent',
        function() {
            console.log('Oops... trying to leave the page');
        });
   

Reference

1. Enable the plugin:

    $.exitIntent('enable')
   

2. Disable the plugin:

    $.exitIntent('disable')
   

3. Use customized settings when enabling:

    $.exitIntent('disable', { 'sensitivity': 100 })
   

Settings

The second parameter to the $.exitIntent plugin call can contain a settings object. The following settings are recognized:

• sensitivity - adjust the sensitivity to detect when the user is about to exit. In practical terms, this is the time (in milliseconds) the user is allowed to "exit" your page, but come back without triggering the exitintent. Default: 300.

FAQ

1. How do I display a modal popup when the user is trying to leave my page?

   This plugin only deals with detecting when the user is leaving the page, and triggering the exitintent event. It's up to you do define what you want to do when the user is leaving. For example, if you want to display a modal dialog, you may use your preferred jQuery modal plugin to display the modal.

2. How do I detect an exit intent on my mobile site?

   There are no interesting events in a mobile site that can be used to try detect if the user is going to exit. This may be extremely difficult to implement reliably, if not impossible.

Future Improvements

1. Detect when users intend to exit by clicking on an external link

2. Detect when users intend to exit by closing the browser window. This can be done by using some heuristics, for example, when exiting from the bottom of the browser in MS Windows, the browser is close to the bottom of the screen, and not returning after some milliseconds.

Contact me at flaviovs at magnux dot com if you'd like to see these improvements added to the plugin.

Legal

Copyright (C) 2016 Flávio Veloso

This plugin is released under the terms of the MIT license. See the LICENSE file for more details.

If you think you found a bug in this plugin, please visit https://github.com/flaviovs/jquery.exitintent/issues and open a new issue.