What is Bounce Rate?

Bounce rate counts visits that ended on the page they started on, with no second page and no tracked interaction. A high number is not automatically bad: someone who searched for a definition, read it and left was served perfectly. It becomes a warning when the page exists to move people somewhere (a landing page, a category page, a homepage) and most visitors leave instead, which usually means a mismatch between what the visitor expected and what they found, or a page that loaded too slowly to find out.

Google Analytics 4 replaced the classic metric with engagement rate (the share of sessions that lasted over ten seconds, had a conversion or viewed two pages) and defines bounce as its inverse, so numbers from GA4 and older tools are not comparable. Whatever the definition, the useful analysis is by landing page and traffic source, not the site-wide average.