Bounce Rate

Bounce rate is the share of visitors who land on a page and leave without taking another action — no second page click, no form submission, no scroll-tracked event, depending on how the analytics tool defines 'engagement'. GA4 changed the definition vs the older Universal Analytics: GA4 uses 'engagement rate' (the inverse) as the primary metric, defining engaged sessions as those over 10 seconds, with a conversion event, or with 2+ pageviews.

Typical bounce rates by page type: blog posts 70–90% (visitors come in from search, read the post, leave — this is healthy). Landing pages 35–60% (visitors who don't convert leave). Pricing pages 25–50%. Home pages 30–55%. Comparing your bounce rate to industry baselines is more useful than chasing a low number.

High bounce rate isn't always bad. A blog post that answers a specific question often gets visitors who read the answer and leave — that's success, not failure. A landing page with high bounce rate IS usually a problem, because the visitor didn't take the conversion action you wanted.

Common causes of unhealthy bounce rate: page load too slow (Core Web Vitals fail), search-intent mismatch (the page doesn't deliver what the user expected from the query), broken design (mobile layout breaks, font illegible, CTAs unclickable), missing value proposition (the visitor can't tell within 5 seconds what the page is for), or aggressive popups that interrupt before the user has engaged.

GA4 specifically: engagement rate = (engaged sessions / total sessions). Inverse of GA3 bounce rate. An engagement rate of 60% means 60% of visitors stayed engaged. Most marketing sites target engagement rates of 50–65%.