Bounce rate

What is bounce rate?

Bounce rate is the share of visits where someone lands on a page and leaves without doing anything else. No second page, no tracked interaction, just arrive and go. It's long been read as a signal that a page failed to hold attention, though that reading depends heavily on context.

The definition shifted with GA4. Universal Analytics called a bounce any single-page session. GA4 flipped the logic around engagement: a session is "engaged" if it lasts over ten seconds, fires a conversion, or includes two or more page views, and bounce rate is now the percentage of sessions that aren't engaged. A high bounce rate isn't automatically bad. A blog post that answers a question completely might have a high bounce because the reader got what they came for and left satisfied. On a product or checkout page, the same number is a warning. Reading the metric without the page's purpose leads people to fix things that aren't broken.

Bounce rate is most useful as a comparison, not an absolute. The same page over time, or two versions against each other, tells you more than a single percentage ever will.

Bounce rate at Dallonses

We use bounce rate as a question, not a verdict. A spike on a key page is a prompt to dig, but the number alone never tells you whether the problem is content, speed, or the wrong audience arriving in the first place.

Inside our data analytics work we read it next to load times and the rest of the picture, since a page that's slow to render pushes people out before it ever had a chance. We pair that with the performance and SEO QA we run, so a high bounce traces back to a real cause instead of a guess. The metric earns its keep when it's connected to everything around it, which is how we treat it with clients.

Bounce rate climbing on a page that matters? Let's find out why.

Talk to us about analytics