Bounce rate
also called Bounces
Definition
The share of visits that ended without further interaction, as recorded by your web-analytics source.
Scope, grain and dimensions
- Grain
- One number per date range, or one row per breakdown value.
- Dimensions
- country · device · page · keyword · source_medium · intent · category
- Required filters
- date_range
- Aggregation
- An average of a per-row bounce-rate column supplied by the analytics export, with nulls read as zero. It is not recomputed from bounce and session counts.
- Metric type
- rate · not established in the codebase
Data sources
Skills and analyses that use it
Skills carry the judgment; the analysis verbs do the reading.
Analysis verbs
web_analytics_overview
Method rungs and levers
A rung tells you what a movement here can and cannot explain, read the rungs below it first.
Ask Quattr
- "What is our bounce rate?" Simulate this →
- "Which landing pages bounce most?" Simulate this →
Caveats, freshness and failure modes
It is an average of a per-row rate rather than a recomputed ratio, so rows with very little traffic weigh the same as rows with a lot.
It is one of the two measures the engagement shorthand expands to, so it appears in default responses even when it was not asked for by name.
Whole-domain only today.
Nulls are read as zero in the underlying measure, so a zero can mean either no bounces or no data.
- Freshness
- loads nightly, a same-day question gets yesterday's number, labelled as yesterday's.
Common failure modes
- Painting a bounce-rate rise as an improvement because a direction oracle defaulted it to higher-is-better.
- Comparing page-level bounce rates without weighting by traffic.
Not the same as
The confusions that cause the most wrong decisions.
Bounce rate Average session duration Compare definitions →
Both are surfaced together under the engagement shorthand, but one is a rate over visits and the other is a duration. They move independently and are reported as separate columns.
Watch this metric read in a real run
All runs →
Related metrics and workflows
Metrics
Verification
A definition is the smallest part of this.
The measurement matters because something acts on it. Here is the rest of the showcase, in the order most people find useful.