Bounce Rate

Bounce rate measures the percentage of visitors who land on a page and leave without engaging further — no clicks, form submissions, or navigation to other pages. It's a straightforward metric: if 100 people visit a page and 40 leave immediately, your bounce rate is 40%.

For most businesses, a high bounce rate signals a problem. Visitors might have found your page through a misleading search result, poor ad targeting, or outdated content. They might also have landed on a page that doesn't match their intent, loads slowly, or simply doesn't answer their question. Understanding why visitors bounce helps you identify friction points in your user experience.

Context matters considerably. A landing page designed to capture leads might legitimately have a lower bounce rate than a blog article or pricing page, where visitors often get what they need and leave. Bounce rate alone doesn't tell you whether you have a problem — it's a diagnostic tool that prompts further investigation.

In Google Analytics 4, bounce rate has been replaced with engagement rate, which measures the inverse: the percentage of sessions that included meaningful interactions. This shift reflects a more nuanced understanding of visitor behaviour. Rather than simply counting exits, GA4 considers time on page, scroll depth, and interactions to determine whether a visit was genuinely engaged or not.