Bounce Rate

Bounce rate is the share of visits to a website where the user leaves again without engaging. In Google Analytics 4 a visit counts as a bounce when the session is not engaged: it lasts under 10 seconds, triggers no key event and never gets past a single page view.

GA4 redefined the metric

In Universal Analytics, bounce rate was the share of sessions with only one page view. GA4 inverted the logic and made engagement the load-bearing idea. A reader who spends three minutes on an article and then closes the tab used to count as a bounce; in GA4 that session counts as engaged.

Old rules of thumb about a good bounce rate sitting around 50% therefore belong to the previous definition. A reasonable level also depends on page type: a contact page can carry a high bounce rate if people find the phone number and call, while a webshop category page should sit lower.

What bounce rate means for SEO

Google has repeatedly denied that Analytics data feeds its rankings, so bounce rate does not move positions on its own. In SEO work the metric is still useful as a diagnosis, because it exposes pages that attract clicks without meeting the expectation behind them. When a page misses the search intent, users return to the results, and that behavior surfaces here first. The guide to bounce rate works through the diagnosis, and Google Analytics is where the number lives.