SEO glossary
Bounce rate
Bounce rate is the percentage of sessions in which someone arrived, did nothing measurable, and left without a second interaction.
Whether a high rate is bad depends entirely on what the page is for. A reference page that answers the question in its first paragraph should have a high bounce rate — the visitor got what they came for and left satisfied. A product page with the same number has a problem.
It is also not a Google ranking factor. Google does not receive your analytics, and the behavioural signals it does use are its own. A bounce rate that improves because you changed how it is measured does not move anything in search.
GA4 redefined it as the inverse of engagement rate, where an engaged session means ten seconds, a conversion, or two page views. So a figure from GA4 is not comparable with the same figure from Universal Analytics, and comparisons across that boundary are meaningless.
Common question
- Does bounce rate affect rankings?
- No. Google has no access to your analytics. It uses its own interaction signals, which are not the same measurement.
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