What is bounce rate?

The share of visits where somebody arrived, looked at one page, and left.

If a hundred visits started this week and thirty-eight of them never went anywhere else, your bounce rate is 38%. It’s one of the six tiles on the dashboard, and clicking it draws it on the graph. Every metric is defined here.

The thing to hold onto: bounce rate describes the visit, not the page. A single-page visit is a bounce regardless of how long the person stayed or how far down they read, and it’s counted against the page they landed on.

Which is why a high bounce rate isn’t automatically bad. On a documentation page, a recipe, a phone number, an “is the office open on Monday” answer - a bounce is the site working perfectly. Somebody arrived, got the thing, left. A high bounce rate on a pricing page is a different story.

If you want to know whether people are reading, bounce rate is the wrong number. Look at visit duration next to it, or set a scroll-depth goal and measure the thing you care about.

Two more notes:

• An interaction rescues a bounce, an engagement ping doesn’t. A second pageview ends a bounce, and so does any interactive event - an outbound click, a download, a form submission, a feasible('Signup'). The engagement ping that carries time on page and scroll depth is excluded, because that’s the script talking rather than the visitor.
• A bounce still has a duration here, because engagement is measured continuously rather than only from one pageview to the next. Plenty of tools report zero seconds for every bounce; that’s an artifact of how they measure, not a fact about the visitor.

Bounce rate and exit rate get confused constantly, and they answer different questions.