Bounce rate

Bounce rate measures how often visitors leave a site or app after viewing only the entry page, without clicking through, scrolling meaningfully, or triggering any other tracked action. It has long been used as a rough proxy for landing page relevance and content quality, especially in session-based analytics tools.

In classic web analytics, bounce rate is calculated as single-page sessions / total sessions * 100. GA4 changed the definition: it reports bounce rate as the inverse of engagement rate, so 1 - (engaged sessions / sessions), where an engaged session is one lasting 10 seconds or more, containing a key event (GA4's name for a conversion), or including two or more page or screen views. As a result, a GA4 bounce rate is usually lower than a classic-tool bounce rate for the same traffic.

Bounce rate is most useful when compared across similar page types and channels, not as an absolute quality score. A high bounce rate on a blog post or reference page can be entirely normal if the visitor got what they needed. It should be read alongside conversion rate and funnel analysis rather than on its own, since a "bounce" says nothing about whether the visit was successful.