Bounce Rate
Definition
The percentage of visitors who navigate away from a site after viewing only one page.
Example Use Case
A blog post with misleading content or slow load times may cause visitors to leave immediately, increasing the bounce rate.
Bounce rate measures the share of sessions that ended after a single page, without the visitor triggering another interaction. It is a useful diagnostic, but only when read against the kind of page involved.
A high bounce rate on a checkout step or a deep product page usually signals a problem: unclear pricing, slow loading, or a mismatch between the ad and the page it pointed to. The same figure on a blog post that answered the reader’s question completely is a success, not a failure. A glossary entry that people read and leave is doing its job.
Modern analytics tools typically treat any engaged interaction — a scroll, a click, a conversion — as non-bounce, which makes the metric stricter than a simple “left without clicking” reading. Compare like with like, and prefer segmenting by page type over watching a single site-wide average.
