Bounce Rate on Google Analytics — A misunderstood metric for web analytics!

Bounce Rate! Why does it matters?

If you are a UX designer, marketing analyst, SEO professional, or anyone who works with a website and the data, you have come across the term Bounce Rate and want to know all about it. Well, you are in the right place!

So what is a Bounce Rate?

Not to be confused with an exit rate, bounce rate is a web analytics metric that represents the percentage of visitors who enter your website and leave, rather than engage with it. After all, the whole point of a website is so that the visitors engage with the site in specific ways that meet our objectives for the site.

To break it down further, most analytics systems, including Google Analytics, consider a bounce as a user who leaves the website without engaging with the site at all. This means that if a user enters a page and engages with it, like watching a video or interacting with a slide, it might not be considered a bounce, even if they just visit one page of your website and then leaves. A user can gain information that they need from a page, without navigating away from it.

If you want to know what to learn about these page interactions, you can set up event tracking for on-page elements that the visitors are likely to interact with. This means you can choose interactive events or non-interactive events. If an event is interactive, this means that triggering this event will make the session a non-bounce session, regardless of whether or not the user then visits other pages or leaves immediately afterward.

If visits are not triggering events for a page if the event is non-interactive, then regardless of a user interaction all tools of a page, it will be considered as a bounce if the user leaves afterward You will not know what interactions the user made.

So, keep the following in mind: Google Analytics considers bounce as a visit from a single interaction hit, not a visit with a single pageview. While another pageview may affect your bounce rate, so will any event that has not been set to non-interactive. This is why you need to do a Google Analytics Health Check, especially if there’s a chance you see a page as 0% or 100% bounce rate, which is clearly not natural.