Bounce Rate

Bounce rate is the percentage of sessions where a visitor left without any further interaction beyond the page they landed on.

GA4 changed what "bounce" means compared to old Universal Analytics. UA counted a bounce as a single-pageview session with no events. GA4 flips the framing to "engagement rate" (the inverse concept) and defines an engaged session as one lasting 10+ seconds, having a conversion event, or having 2+ pageviews — so a GA4 bounce rate and a UA bounce rate for the same traffic are not directly comparable numbers, even though they sound like the same metric.

A high bounce rate isn't automatically bad. Someone who lands on a page, reads the one paragraph they needed, and leaves satisfied technically "bounced" — for content and reference pages, this can be a perfectly healthy pattern rather than a failure.