Bounce rate is the percentage of visits in which the user didn’t interact with the page at all: they didn’t click anything, didn’t go any further and left after a moment. In Google Analytics 4, a bounce is a visit that wasn’t an ‘engaged session’, meaning it lasted under 10 seconds, with no key event and no second page view.
When is a high bounce rate a problem?
When a page is supposed to move people on and fails to. On a campaign landing page, an 80% bounce rate means you’re paying for traffic that bounces straight off: the promise in the ad doesn’t match what people find, the page loads slowly on mobile, or it’s unclear what to click. Context matters, though: a blog article that fully answers a question can have a high bounce rate and satisfied readers. Read the metric for each type of page. A single figure for the whole site tells you very little.
How can you reduce bounce rate on pages that need to sell?
We check in this order: speed on mobile (the most common culprit), whether the page headline matches the promise in the ad, and a clear CTA that’s visible without scrolling. On our website projects we test pages on real phones over a slow connection, because on a fast laptop every site seems to work fine.
Related terms: Google Analytics 4, landing page.
