What is the Bounce Rate?

A bounce rate refers to the percentage of website visitors or app users who only view one page or one part of content before leaving the site.

Google Research Nov 12, 2022 0 911 Add to Reading List

Google Analytics defines a "bout" as a session with one interaction hit. Interaction hits can be pageviews or other interactions you have created on your page. Learn more about interaction event.

The bounce percentage simply refers to the percentage of sessions that bounce. If 75 sessions had only one pageview, and there was no interaction, the bounce rate would be 75%.

Are High Bounce Rates Bad?

It depends. Your bounce rate is 100% if your website only has one page with no interaction points. This would be acceptable. A page may be intended to be an exit and one-stop page even in a large site. Your site might require you to move through more pages in order for conversions to occur. You will want a lower bouncerate in this case.

How does SEO affect bounce rate?

This is a tricky question. Google has stated publicly that it doesn't use Google Analytics' bounce rate (or any other GA-derived metric) to rank its sites in search engines. Google would only have partial information since not all websites use Google Analytics. Google may use related signals. The site was not helpful so the user quickly returns to the search results and clicks another result. Google can infer that the query and first site are not relevant to the user.

In practice, however, bounce rate is unlikely to have an impact on SEO. However, if your bounce rate is high due to poor content or relevance of your landing pages then this can help you identify the underlying issues that directly impact SEO.

How to check the bounce rate in Google Analytics?

To plot the trend of users and their bounce rate, you can add "bouncerate" to your metric. Scroll down to see summaries by landing pages - bounce rate is one key metric for each landing page. In the examples videos, we use the Google demo account. This is a Google property.

You can not only reduce data by landing pages, but you can also reduce it by traffic source (or other dimensions GA provides).

In this dataset, it looks like there is one landing page in particular (/google+redesign/shop+by+brand/youtube) that gets a lot of traffic and has a rather high bounce rate compared to the rest. It is unnecessary to look into further if you are certain that the page does not expect additional interactions. You can also drill down to the page you are interested in and examine the trends over time. You might want to check this landing page for optimization and relevance, especially for Youtube traffic.