Bounce Rate in Google Analytics 4 (GA4)

Bounce rate measures the performance of your site and content. Tracking it helps your marketing team understand if pages meet user needs and find leaky parts of your funnel.

But Google Analytics 4 measures bounce rate slightly differently than other analytics platforms. 

In this post, I’ll explain what bounce rate is in GA4, show you how to calculate it, and discuss proven strategies to reduce it.

Key Takeaways

• Bounce rate in Google Analytics 4 is the percentage of sessions that aren’t engaged. 
• An engaged session is one that lasts longer than 10 seconds, has a key event, or at least two page views. 
• Calculate bounce rate by dividing the number of bounced sessions (those that weren’t engaged) by the total number of sessions and multiplying by 100.
• Google Analytics 4 doesn’t have a standard bounce rate report. You’ll need to customize individual reports in order to see it. 
• Bounce rate can tell you a lot about the performance of your site and content. High bounce rates can suggest poor-quality content that doesn’t meet user expectations. They can also suggest technical issues with your site, like slow load speeds. 
• There are several ways to reduce bounce rates, including boosting your site’s readability, using more compelling calls-to-action, and improving site speed.  

Table of Contents

• Key Takeaways
• What Is Bounce Rate?
  • Bounce Rate vs. Engagement Rate
• Why is Bounce Rate Important?
• How To Calculate Bounce Rate In GA4
• How To Find Bounce Rate In GA4
• What Can You Learn From Your Bounce Rate?
• How To Reduce Your Bounce Rate
• FAQs
• Conclusion

What Is Bounce Rate?

Let’s start by answering a fundamental question: what is bounce rate?

Marketers usually define bounce rate as the percentage of sessions where a user only views a single page.

So if you have 1,000 visitors land on your site and 100 of them leave immediately, you have a 10 percent bounce rate.

Things are a little different in Google Analytics 4, where bounce rate is the percentage of sessions that are not engaged. It is the inverse of engagement rate. 

Let me explain what that means below.

Bounce Rate vs. Engagement Rate

GA4 puts a huge emphasis on engaged sessions. These are sessions that either:

• Last longer than 10 seconds
• Have a key event (as defined by your site)
• Have at least two page views

Your site’s engagement rate is the percentage of engaged sessions compared to the total sessions. In the above screenshot, email led to 1,356 engaged sessions out of 1,630 total, equating to an engagement rate of 83.19 percent.

Bounce rate is the percentage of sessions that aren’t engaged. In this case, that would be 16.81 percent (because you can subtract the 83.19 percent of engaged sessions from 100 percent).

Why is Bounce Rate Important?

High bounce rates impede your marketing and sales efforts. 

If you have a high bounce rate, your site isn’t engaging users or encouraging them to take another action. They aren’t entering your funnel, which ultimately means you miss out on a sale or other conversion. This issue is exacerbated when users come from paid ads, where you pay per click since every user that bounces is a cost you can’t recoup. 

A high bounce rate may impact your rankings, too. We know from the recent Google leak that the search giant uses click data in its rankings, paying particular attention to engagement. In other words, high bounce rates could lower rankings.   

While you can’t control Google, you can track your bounce rate and make efforts to improve it over time. That all starts with learning how to calculate it. 

How To Calculate Bounce Rate In GA4

Now we know what an engaged session is, it’s pretty easy to calculate bounce rate. 

All you need to do is divide the number of bounced sessions (those that did not meet the criteria above) by the total number of sessions and then multiply by 100 to get a percentage.

GA4 Bounce Rate = Bounced Sessions (non-engaged sessions) / Total Sessions x 100

So if you had 10,000 visitors last month and 8,000 of them were engaged according to GA4, then you would have a bounce rate of 20 percent using the following bounce rate calculation:

2000/10000 x 100 = 20 percent.

Easy, right?

How To Find Bounce Rate In GA4

How to find bounce rate in Google Analytics isn’t as straightforward as you might think. There’s no standard report, which means you’ll need to customize your own reports instead. 

Start by signing into Google Analytics and clicking Reports in the left-hand menu. You’ll need to be an Editor or Administrator to customize reports, by the way.

Find the report you want to customize, then click Customize Report in the upper right-hand corner.

Then click Metrics under Report Data.

Click Add Metric and then click Engagement Rate and Bounce Rate. Click Apply to save the changes. Note that if you only see Add Cards and not Metrics, you’re in an overview report. You can only add metrics to a detail report.

Finding your engagement rate is much easier as it’s included in many pre-built reports, including the traffic acquisition report you can see below, in the 3rd row from the left:

You can also find engagement rate on the user acquisition report so you can calculate bounce rate.

What Can You Learn From Your Bounce Rate?

Marketers can learn a lot by measuring their bounce rate and comparing it to the industry average. That’s 45 percent across all industries, by the way. But it varies massively between them. It is as low as 27.92 percent in the apparel niche and as high as 48.22 percent in the IT industry, for example. 

There are certain situations where a high bounce rate may be more common (for example, if your site is only one page), but comparing your bounce rate to the industry average can show you the extent to which you need to improve. 

Tracking bounce rate can also give insights into content performance. The more engaging and helpful your content, the lower your bounce rate should be. High bounce rates, on the other hand, suggest your content doesn’t meet audience expectations. If organic traffic engagement is low, you may not be meeting search intent, either.  

Case in point, we surveyed 1,000 Americans aged 18-65 and found that content relevance and quality had the biggest impact on first impressions. Site speed and load time came second, followed by ease of navigation. 

Further, 30 percent of users expect to find the information they’re looking for in a blog within the first few seconds. Over one-quarter want to see it in the first paragraph. 

You can also use bounce rates to measure technical performance. Pages with high bounce rates may also have underlying technical issues like slow loading times, error codes, or broken links. 

How To Reduce Your Bounce Rate

Speaking of improvement, there are several tactics you can use to reduce your site’s bounce rate. Here are 14 of my favorite methods:

• Improve Your Site’s Readability and user experience (UX): Poor readability can cause users to leave. In fact, our research found an easy-to-read text layout is the most important design element for users. 
• Remove Intrusive Interstitials: Users hated intrusive pop-ups and ads more than any other UX issue, according to our survey. Get rid of them before they scare off visitors. 
• Create A Compelling Call To Action (CTA): The more compelling it is, the fewer visitors will leave without clicking it.
• Improve Your Brand Storytelling: Good stories engage readers and make them stick around.
• Make Sure Your Content Is Up-To-Date: Outdated content can make visitors leave, as it fails to meet their needs.
• Focus on Keywords With Volume and Search Intent: They should be relevant to your business and attract users further down the funnel where possible. 
• Align Your Content With Your Audience Needs and Preferences: The better your content serves their needs, the longer they will stick around.
• Write Attractive Meta Descriptions For Search Users: This will encourage searchers to click on your link. 
• Build Landing Pages for High-Volume Keywords: The more landing pages you have optimized for high-volume keywords, the higher your chances of ranking in search results and potentially increasing your click-through rate. 
• Speed Up Your Page Load Times: Users will leave if your website doesn’t load quickly. 
• Set External Links To Open In New Windows: This lets users continue to browse your site after clicking. 
• Build A Mobile-Friendly Website: When almost 60 percent of people use smartphones to browse websites, you need to use a responsive design to keep them happy. 
• Focus on E-E-A-T: This stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. Adding E-E-A-T signals ensures you deliver exceptional value and increases trust.
• Improve Your Internal Linking Strategy: It encourages visitors to read related content and spend more time on your site. Few, irrelevant, or no links at all makes it much more likely visitors will leave your site after only viewing one page.  

Read my dedicated guide for more help reducing your bounce rate. 

FAQs

What is bounce rate in GA4?

Bounce rate in GA4 is the inverse of engagement rate. It is the number of sessions that aren’t engaged. An engaged session lasts longer than 10 seconds, has a conversion event, or has two or more page views.

How to find bounce rate in Google Analytics 4?

Finding bounce rate in GA4 is a little tricky, as you’ll need to customize the specific report you want to see it in. Find your report in the Report tab and click the edit icon in the upper right-hand corner of the report. Click Metrics, then Add Metric, and then choose Bounce Rate. Click Apply to save your changes.

How do you calculate bounce rate?

In GA4, you calculate bounce rate by dividing the number of sessions that aren’t engaged by the total number of sessions and multiplying by 100 to give a percentage. 

There are other ways to calculate bounce rate. The most common is to divide the number of sessions where a user only visits one page by the total number of sessions and multiply by 100 to give a percentage.

Conclusion

Now you know how to calculate bounce rate in Google Analytics 4, it’s time to start creating websites that attract and engage visitors rather than repel them. You can add bounce rate to your GA4 reports if you wish. However, I recommend following Google’s lead and focusing on your site’s engagement rate instead. If you can make your site as engaging as possible, your bounce rate will take care of itself.