What Is Bounce Rate? Why Does It Matter? Explained for Beginners

Understanding why people leave your site after viewing just one page could mean the difference between losing a customer and making a sale.

That’s where bounce rate comes in. It shows the percentage of visitors who land on a page and then exit without taking another step. For years, this number was treated as a key measure of website performance. But in today’s analytics, especially since the introduction of GA4, the bounce rate has taken a back seat to more meaningful engagement metrics.

This article will discuss what this metric is and what it means for your website. Let’s dive in!

What is bounce rate?

In website analytics, a ‘bounce’ occurs when a visitor lands on a webpage and exits without viewing a second page on your site. Your bounce rate is calculated by taking the number of one-page visits to your site and dividing it by the total page entries or sessions.

So, for example, if 100 visitors enter your page and 40 of them leave your site without viewing a second page, your bounce rate equals 40%.

It’s important to note that a “bounce” doesn’t just mean a visitor clicked the Back button. A visitor may bounce from your site in several ways, such as:

• Clicking on an external link to another site
• Using the Back button to leave the page
• Closing the tab or window
• Session timeout

Bouncing can often be worrisome. For instance, it may mean your website is too confusing to navigate, or that it lacks clear calls to action (CTAs).

It could also indicate that your content is boring, your design is not responsive, or that your website takes too long to load. These issues could negatively impact your search engine rankings, so it’s essential to pay close attention to this metric.

Can a high bounce rate be good?

As I already mentioned, a high bounce rate doesn’t always indicate that there’s a problem. For instance, it could suggest that your visitors found exactly what they were looking for right away and left fully satisfied.

Or, if the goal of your page is to drive people towards an external link (e.g. an affiliate link click), this could mean that you were successful in getting them to click the affiliate link.

If you’re running an online store, a high bounce rate might also indicate that your customers are ‘window shopping’. They might still come back to purchase an item later, so this metric is not always a true reflection of your website’s success.

You can also expect higher bounce rates for content such as:

• Landing pages
• Blog posts
• Contact pages
• FAQ pages

Your visitors might spend a considerable amount of time reading through the information provided on these pages. Still, if they don’t proceed to a second page on your site, it counts as a bounce.

For this reason, it’s always smart to view your bounce rate in context alongside other metrics.

For instance, your average engagement time shows the average duration users actively interact with your website. You can also look at metrics like engaged sessions or events per session to see what people are actually doing while they’re on your site. Together, these numbers give you a more complete picture and help you understand not just if visitors left quickly, but whether they found value before they did.

Whether a high bounce rate is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ depends on the type of website you run and the expected customer funnel. According to Kissmetrics, the following rates are considered normal:

• Retail sites: 20–40%
• Landing pages: 70–90%
• Portals: 10–30%
• Service sites: 10–30%
• Content websites: 40–60%
• Lead generation pages: 30–50%

You can use these statistics as your reference points. However, even if your result is acceptable, it’s still smart to listen to your customers and perform regular usability tests.

How to find your site’s bounce rate

In Google Analytics 4, Google decided to move away from bounce rate as a default metric. Instead, it focuses on more useful measures like engaged sessions, average engagement time, and events per session.

You can still see (the new) bounce rate in GA4, but it’s hidden by default. To enable it, you’ll need to customize your reports a little. Here’s how to do it:

1. Go to Reports in GA4.
2. Open a report where you’d like bounce rate to appear (for example, Engagement → Pages and screens).
3. Click the Customize report (pencil icon in the top right).
4. Under Metrics, click + Add metric.
5. Search for and select Bounce rate.
6. Click Apply, then Save (either save to the current report or as a new report).

Once added, you’ll see bounce rate alongside engagement metrics.

💡 Tip: In GA4, bounce rate is simply the inverse of engagement rate. So if your engagement rate is 70%, your bounce rate will be 30%. Some GA4 reports already show engagement rate by default. So there’s no need to also display bounce rate in the same view – it would just be showing the inverse.

How to improve your site’s bounce rate

If you’re worried your bounce rate is running too high, here are some techniques you can try to reduce your bounce rate:

How to make bounce rate more meaningful

Finally, consider what bounce rate really means for your site. In GA4, you can’t set up an “adjusted bounce rate” the way you could in Universal Analytics, but you can customize what counts as engagement. Since bounce rate is simply the inverse of engagement rate, tweaking your engagement settings gives you more accurate insights into how people interact with your content.

Some common adjustments you can make include:

• Changing the engagement timer – By default, GA4 considers a session engaged after 10 seconds. You can increase this (up to 60 seconds) in your Data Stream settings so that longer reads or watches count as engagement, which is especially useful for blogs and content-heavy sites.
• Marking important actions as conversions – If affiliate link clicks, video plays, or form submissions are valuable to you, track them as conversion events. This ensures those visits are counted as engaged sessions rather than bounces.

By tailoring engagement to reflect the actions that really matter on your site, you’ll end up with a bounce rate that’s much more meaningful.

Conclusion

As a general guideline, a bounce rate of 40–50% is often considered average, but there’s no universal “good” number. What matters most is how the metric aligns with your site’s goals and the type of content you offer.

Do you have any questions about bounce rate? Let us know in the comments section below!