What is a good bounce rate?

What bounce rate means in GA4

Google counts a visit as engaged (it says an engaged session) when it meets any one of three rules:[1]

• it lasted longer than 10 seconds,
• it included a “key event”, an action you marked as important, or
• it had 2 or more page or screen views.

Bounce rate is the share of visits that met none of them. Google calls it the opposite of the engaged share (its name: engagement rate).[1] A second Google page words the first rule as 10 seconds or longer, and calls the actions by another name (conversion events).[2] The idea is the same: a bounce is a short visit that did nothing you marked as important.

Three automatic actions never make a visit engaged, even if you mark them as key: first_visit, first_open and session_start.[1]

Why there is no single good number

Read the rules against two real pages. A visitor who reads one article for three minutes and leaves is engaged, because the visit lasted longer than 10 seconds.[1] A visitor who opens your contact page, finds the phone number in five seconds and calls you is a bounce, unless the call is something you marked as a “key event”.[1]

So a high bounce rate on a page that answers a question fast can be the page doing its job, and a low one can hide visitors who stayed 11 seconds and gave up. A figure from other people’s sites, with other pages, other visitors and other choices of “key event”, tells you little about yours.

Where to find bounce rate in GA4

By default most GA4 reports leave bounce rate out. You add it by customising a report, which needs the Editor or Administrator role on the property.[1] Add it to the pages report rather than looking at one figure for the whole site, since each page has its own job.

How to read your own bounce rate

1. Mark what matters first. Any action you collect can be marked as a “key event”.[3] Mark the ones that mean a page worked, such as a contact form sent or a phone link tapped, so a short visit that did its job stops counting as a bounce.[1]
2. Compare a page with itself. Watch one page’s bounce rate across months, and after each change you make to it.
3. Compare like with like. A blog post, a product page and a contact page have different jobs, so read them apart.
4. Check the tag before the number. Google says a Google tag that fires after other tracking on the page can give wrong counts.[4] A sudden jump in bounce rate after a site change is worth checking there first.

What Convertlyft shows instead

Convertlyft does not give a bounce rate. A bounce rate says how many left; it cannot say why. For a page people leave, Convertlyft shows what they did there: recordings of the visits, a heatmap of where they clicked and how far they scrolled, and the funnel step where they stopped. Its line runs beside the GA4 tag and does not change it.