In plain English
It's the share of people who open your shop door, glance around and walk straight back out. A few always will; a lot suggests the window promised something the shop didn't have.
Used in a sentence
“The bounce rate on the service pages dropped once the phone number and prices question moved to the top.”
“Our blog has a high bounce rate, but people read the whole post and leave happy, so it's fine.”
In detail
In Google Analytics 4, bounce rate is the opposite of engagement rate: the share of sessions that weren't engaged. A session counts as engaged if the visitor stays at least ten seconds, views more than one page, or completes a key event like a form. Older analytics counted any single-page visit as a bounce.
A high bounce rate isn't always bad. Someone who finds your phone number and calls straight away may never click further. It's most useful page by page: a service page that bounces far more than similar pages probably has a mismatch between what brought people there and what they found.
Why it matters for your business
Bounce rate, read page by page, points to pages that aren't answering the question people arrived with.
- Flags pages that miss the mark
- Best compared between similar pages
- Read alongside calls and forms
Easy to mix up
Bounce rate isn't exit rate. Exit rate is how often a page is the last one viewed in any visit; bounce rate is about visits that didn't engage at all.
Related terms
Google Analytics (GA4), Conversion and Heatmap. Or browse the whole glossary.
