Bounce Rate

Bounce rate is the percentage of visits where someone views a single page and leaves without any further interaction. It sounds like a quality score but it is easy to misread — a high bounce can be perfectly healthy or a serious problem depending entirely on the page’s job.

Always interpret bounce in the context of intent. A high bounce on a blog post that fully answered the question can be fine — the visitor got what they came for. A high bounce on a pricing or demo page is a leak worth investigating: slow load, poor message match, or no obvious next step. Note that GA4 reframed this around engaged sessions, which is a more useful lens than raw bounce.

Bounce rate is a symptom to investigate, never a KPI to chase or a ranking factor to obsess over — optimising the metric directly (adding fake interactions to reduce it) is pure vanity. Senior practitioners look past bounce to genuine engagement and conversion signals, use it only to flag money pages that are leaking, and educate stakeholders who mistake a high bounce on informational content for a problem that needs fixing.