What is Bounce rate?
Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who arrive on a page and leave without interacting further.
Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who arrive on a page and leave without interacting further.
The traditional definition is a session with a single page view and no other recorded interaction. Newer analytics tools define it as the inverse of an engaged session — one lasting beyond a few seconds, or including a conversion or a second page view — which means bounce rates from different tools and different eras are not comparable.
A high bounce rate is not automatically bad, and this is the part most often misread. A visitor who lands on your contact page, reads your phone number and calls you has bounced by most definitions and has also done exactly what you wanted. For local businesses, whose customers frequently arrive, find a number and phone, a high bounce rate on some pages is a sign of success.
Where it is genuinely diagnostic is on pages meant to lead somewhere. A landing page built to produce form submissions with a 90% bounce rate has a problem, and it is usually speed, a mismatch between the ad and the page, or no obvious next step.
Read in context it points at pages that are failing to do their job. Read as a single site-wide number it is one of the most misleading metrics in analytics.
Chasing a lower bounce rate as a goal. It is trivially reduced by breaking content across more pages, which makes the number better and the experience worse.
Bounce rate is part of website development
Understanding the term is the easy half. The service page describes what the work actually involves, and the free assessment says whether it is the thing your business should be spending on next — which is frequently a different question.
Things that come up alongside it
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