Bounces and bounce rate in Google Analytics

‘Another request’ could include navigating to other pages on the same site or clicking on a call to action (CTA) to enter or continue through a sales funnel.

For example, if a user lands on your homepage from a search, browses and scrolls around, but fails to click on any internal links or interact in any other meaningful way and then leaves, they have ‘bounced’ from your homepage:

The definition of bounce rate is the percentage of sessions that result in a bounce—that is, sessions that begin and end on the same page. Each page’s bounce rate affects a website’s overall bounce rate. Here’s how:

How is bounce rate calculated for a website and its pages?

A website’s bounce rate is calculated by dividing the number of single-page sessions by the number of total sessions on the site.

For example, if 100 users land on your website (total sessions) and 5 of them exit without triggering another request (single-page sessions), your website’s bounce rate is 5%.

website bounce rate = single-page sessions / total sessions

An individual page’s bounce rate is calculated the same way, but the metrics are page-specific: divide the number of single-page sessions that begin and end on a particular page by the number of total sessions that begin and continue from that same page.

Following the example above: if 50 of those users land on your homepage and 2 of them exit without triggering another request, your homepage has a bounce rate of 4%.

page bounce rate = single-page sessions on the page / total sessions starting from the page

Where can you see bounce rates in Google Analytics?

In GA, you can see the bounce rate metric in reports that include a data table, such as reports found in the Acquisition, Behavior, and Conversion tabs (located in the left menu bar).

For example, you can see a data table displaying bounce rates in the Behavior > Site Content > All Pages report:

To see bounce rates for individual web pages in Google Analytics, you can easily search by page name—for example, /cart/ or /pricing/—or you can use the advanced search feature to narrow down the search results even further by adding inclusions, exclusions, or dimensions and metrics to the search.

What’s the difference between bounce rate and exit rate in GA?

As metrics, both bounce rate and exit rate report on when and where visitors leave your site. The difference is that bounces are only reported in the event of single-page sessions.

For example, if a visitor lands on your ecommerce site’s homepage, they navigate to a category page, then a product page, and then leave the site, an ‘exit’ is attributed to the product page and affects its exit rate:

However, if a visitor lands on your ecommerce site’s homepage, takes a look around, and doesn’t click through or interact with the page in any meaningful way before exiting, a ‘bounce’ is attributed to the homepage and affects its bounce rate:

One more thing to consider: every bounce is an exit, but not every exit is a bounce.

Why is it important to track Google Analytics bounces?

Tracking bounces can help you understand how visitors are using individual pages on your site so you can make optimization and marketing decisions based on whether they interact with the page or not.

For example, tracking bounces can be particularly relevant to landing pages. If you invest a lot of resources to drive people to a landing page, only to have them leave without interacting or progressing through to the rest of your site, consider:

• Optimizing your landing page so your visitors have a clear understanding of their next steps, or

• Investing your resources in a different (or new) page or campaign

Are high bounce rates a bad thing?

Not necessarily.

Yes, if: the success of your website depends on users visiting more than one page—for example having them go through a sales funnel, like homepage → product page → shopping cart → checkout. If visitors land on your homepage but fail to interact, and therefore bounce without converting, you might have an issue that needs investigating, possibly with page design or user experience (UX).

No, if: you have a single-page site (e.g. a landing page for a brick-and-mortar shop), or if you have content on your site meant for single-page sessions—for example a directory that invites visitors to exit via outbound links or a contact page that directs visitors to call you on the phone.

4 ways 'bounce rate' leaves you guessing (and how complementary tools can fill in the blanks)

Tracking bounces might help you understand how people use your website pages. But in reality, bounce rate tells you very little about what’s happening on your site. Traditional quantitative metrics like pageviews and conversion rate need to be considered to put bounce rate in context, along with qualitative measures (more on that in a bit).

There are some caveats when it comes to what you can learn from bounce rate and how you can use the metric—in short, it shouldn’t be the only factor you consider in your optimization efforts.

Here are four reasons bounces could be considered a ‘controversial’ metric:

1. Bounce rates can be tricked

Bounces can be easily tricked: all you have to do is trigger ‘another request’, which can be done by modifying your GA tracking code to account for specific events.

For example, you can set up Google Analytics Events so GA measures outbound clicks (i.e. clicks on external links, which take the visitor to a different website) as ‘events’. Then, if a user lands on your page and leaves by clicking on an external link, it won’t be counted as a bounce—even though the only action taken on the page was to click away from it to another site.

2. Bounces don’t account for the amount of time spent on a page

If another request isn’t triggered before a user exits a page, GA doesn’t know how long the user was there. A visitor could spend an hour on a page and consume it from top to bottom, but if they bounce, GA counts the session’s time period—aka the session duration—as ‘zero’.

This means you don’t know what happens leading up to a bounce, so you have no idea whether a user landed on your page and immediately left out of frustration, or if they simply found what they needed from the page and bounced when they were done.

3. Bounces don’t tell you how a page is performing

Again, bounce rate can give you an idea of how your website pages are being used, but you shouldn’t rely on the metric to measure your pages’ performance. Without knowing what happens before a user bounces, you can’t tell whether the page needs improvement or not.

For example, let’s say your ecommerce site’s homepage has a bounce rate of 45%. What does that tell you? Nothing, really—it could mean a lot of things. For example:

• You might have your phone number and address on your homepage, and that’s all some visitors are looking for

• Your site might be slow and people are giving up and leaving before the page loads

• Maybe the next step isn’t clear and visitors don’t know where to find what they’re looking for

4. ‘Bounce rate’ is a metric out of context

Considering the point above, bounce rate as a metric is out of context: it doesn’t factor in the events or behaviors that occurred before each bounce. Knowing the bounce rate of a page isn’t enough—it still leaves questions unanswered.

Bounce rates don’t tell you why users bounce—in fact, they only lead to more questions:

• What happened leading up to each bounce?

• How are users who bounce behaving differently from those who stay on the site?

• Is there a problem with the page? or

• Are visitors leaving because they’re satisfied with what they’ve found, and don’t have a reason to stay on the site?

There’s no way to attribute a bounce to anything specific without understanding how users are behaving on your site. But knowing what happens leading up to a bounce can help you identify if and where something goes wrong.

To learn what happens before a user bounces—so you can determine what needs to be optimized on your site—you have to go beyond the metric, and consider each bounce in context.

This is where user behavior analysis (UBA) comes in, which can fill in the blanks to help you see and understand the user experience from their perspective. Keep reading to find out how.

2 tools to investigate bounces and high bounce rates on your site

As a traditional web analytics tool, Google Analytics can tell marketers what’s happening on their website—things like bounces, for instance—but it won’t be able to answer questions like:

• Why are people leaving that page without [taking the next step]?

• How do I fix this?

To find the answers, you need to dig deeper into what’s happening on your site and view the data and information about your visitors’ behavior in context.

Here are two behavior analytics and feedback tools you can use when you begin investigating why bounces are happening and how to fix them are session recordings and on-site surveys:

1. Recordings: see how real visitors interact with your high-bounce pages

What: to further investigate bounce rates, you can use session recordings to shed deeper insight into user engagement and see how users are interacting (or not interacting) with pages across your site. Recordings help you go beyond GA to give you a clearer understanding of how people click, interact, and move around on your pages before they bounce so you can identify pain points or blockers they experience—and optimize accordingly.

How: session recordings let you see how real, anonymized users move around and click on your high-bounce pages so you can get a sense of if/where they:

• Encountered website bugs or issues that caused them to exit

• Exhibited behaviors like frequent u-turns or rage clicks—which occur when someone repeatedly clicks on the same element

• Got distracted by pop-ups or other elements

If you’re using Hotjar: after setting up a session recording from the dashboard, the tool will begin recording sessions from your website visitors. You can filter your recordings by first adding the URL of your high-bounce page into the ‘Exit URL’ field, then adding the Page Count filter set to ‘Exactly 1’.

2. On-site surveys: ask visitors how you can improve the user experience

What: using recordings will give you a better idea of what’s happening on your site (and why), but you can take it a step further and use on-site surveys to hear directly from your users—in their own words—on the usability of your site and how to improve it.

How: place an on-site survey on your high-bounce page(s) and ask your visitors a specific, open-ended question, like:

• What’s stopping you from continuing today?

• What’s missing from this page?

• What are you looking for that you can’t find on this page?

If you’re using Hotjar: create an on-site survey and enter the URL of your high-bounce page during the ‘Targeting’ step. Your survey will start to appear on your page as soon as you finish the set-up process.

After you’ve collected some feedback from your visitors, analyze their responses—try to identify patterns that will point you in the direction of a solution to reducing bounces in the future.