What is Bounce Rate?

SEO and Marketing Terms: Bounce Rate

Bounce rate measures the percentage of visits that meet an analytics tool’s definition of a bounce. In Google Analytics 4 (GA4), it is the percentage of sessions that weren’t engaged sessions.

What counts as a bounce?

In GA4, a session counts as engaged when it meets at least one of these conditions:

• Lasts longer than the engagement time threshold, which defaults to 10 seconds.
• Includes a key event, which is an action marked as particularly important to the business, such as a completed purchase.
• Includes at least two page or screen views.

Sessions that meet none of these conditions count as bounces. If 30 out of 100 sessions aren’t engaged, the bounce rate is 30%. A visitor can therefore read just one page and still have an engaged session. Definitions vary between analytics tools, so check how yours calculates the metric before comparing reports.

What can bounce rate tell you?

In analytics, bounce rate is often used to judge whether a page met a visitor’s expectations, but it should be interpreted in context. A high bounce rate can signal mismatch, poor experience, or slow load time, but it can also happen when a visitor gets the answer they needed on one page.

Use it alongside inquiries, sales, and other meaningful results. Tracking errors or changes to engagement settings can also affect the number, so a higher or lower rate alone does not establish whether your marketing is working.