What is bounce rate?

The GA4 definition

A session is engaged if it meets any one of three conditions:

1. it lasted longer than 10 seconds;
2. it included a key event, GA4's term for a conversion;
3. it included two or more page or screen views.

A session that meets none of them is a bounce.

bounce rate = sessions that were not engaged / all sessions
            = 1 − engagement rate

Three visits to a recipe page illustrate it:

Bounce rate here is 33%. The 10-second threshold can be raised in the property's settings, up to 60 seconds.

How this differs from the old definition

In the earlier version of Google Analytics, a bounce was any single-page session with no further interaction, however long it lasted. Visit 1 above, a reader who spent two minutes and got what they came for, counted as a bounce. Blogs, recipe sites and documentation routinely showed rates of 70 to 90% for that reason.

The GA4 version counts that reader as engaged, so GA4 bounce rates are generally much lower than the old ones for the same site. Figures from the two systems cannot be compared, and old rules of thumb about what a "good" bounce rate is do not carry over.

Bounce rate and rankings

Google has said many times that it does not use Google Analytics data in ranking. It could not do so fairly anyway, since many sites do not run Analytics at all. So lowering the number in your reports does not, in itself, change where you rank.

What bounce rate can do is point at problems that also affect search performance:

• Intent mismatch. The page ranks for a query it does not really answer. See search intent.
• Slow loading. People leave before the content appears; see page speed.
• A misleading title or description. The snippet promised something the page does not deliver.
• Poor first screen. Intrusive pop-ups, a wall of ads, or content pushed far down.
• Broken on mobile. Text too small, layout shifting, buttons that do not work.

Fixing those helps users, and several of them are things search engines do evaluate through their own means.

Reading it sensibly

A single site-wide figure hides everything useful. Break it down.

• By landing page. In GA4, add the bounce rate metric to the Landing page report through the report's customise option. It is not shown by default.
• By channel. Paid social often bounces more than organic search, and email less. A blended number just reflects the traffic mix.
• By page purpose. A contact page or a quick-answer page can have a high rate and be doing its job. A product category page with the same rate has a problem.
• By device. A gap between mobile and desktop for the same page usually means a mobile usability fault.

Also check the tracking before trusting the number. A rate near zero usually means the analytics tag fires twice, and a rate near 100% on one template can mean the tag is missing from the pages people go to next.

Improving the pages that need it

Start from pages with meaningful traffic and a rate well above the site's norm for their type.

1. Open the page on a phone, on mobile data. Time how long it takes for the main content to be readable.
2. Compare the top queries for the page in Search Console with what its first screen says. Rewrite the opening to answer the leading query directly.
3. Give the reader a next step that fits: a related guide, a product, a table of contents for a long article.
4. Remove whatever blocks the content on arrival.

On WordPress, internal links are the simplest lever for the third point. Hydrogen SEO's internal link counter shows the internal links into and out of each post, so dead-end posts with none going out are easy to spot, and the Table of Contents block helps readers find the part of a long post they came for. For speed, see improving Core Web Vitals in WordPress.