A bounce is a single-page session on your site. In Analytics, a bounce is calculated specifically as a session that triggers only a single request to the Analytics server, such as when a user opens a single page on your site and then exits without triggering any other requests to the Analytics server during that session. Bounce rate is single-page sessions divided by all sessions, or the percentage of all sessions on your site in which users viewed only a single page and triggered only a single request to the Analytics server. These single-page sessions have a session duration of 0 seconds since there are no subsequent hits after the first one that would let Analytics calculate the length of the session. Learn more about how session duration is calculated.

Is a high bounce rate a bad thing?

It depends. If the success of your site depends on users viewing more than one page, then, yes, a high bounce rate is bad. For example, if your home page is the gateway to the rest of your site (e.g., news articles, product pages, your checkout process) and a high percentage of users are viewing only your home page, then you don’t want a high bounce rate. On the other hand, if you have a single-page site like a blog, or offer other types of content for which single-page sessions are expected, then a high bounce rate is perfectly normal.

Lower your bounce rate

Examine your bounce rate from different perspectives. For example:

• The Audience Overview report provides the overall bounce rate for your site.
• The Channels report provides the bounce rate for each channel grouping.
• The All Traffic report provides the bounce rate for each source/medium pair.
• The All Pages report provides the bounce rate for individual pages.

If your overall bounce rate is high, then you can dig deeper to see whether it’s uniformly high or whether it’s the result of something like one or two channels, source/medium pairs, or just a few pages. For example, if just a few pages are the problem, examine whether the content correlates well with the marketing you use to drive users to those pages, and whether those pages offer users easy paths to the next steps you want them to take. If a particular channel has a high bounce rate, take a look at your marketing efforts for that channel: for example, if users coming via display are bouncing, make sure your ads are relevant to your site content. If the problem is more widespread, take a look at your tracking-code implementation to be sure all the necessary pages are tagged and that they’re tagged correctly. And you may want to reevaluate your overall site design and examine the language, graphics, color, calls to action, and visibility of important page elements. You can use Optimize to test different versions of your site pages to see which designs encourage users to engage more. If you have a single-page site, learn about non-interaction events that you can implement to better capture user engagement and identify single-page sessions that are not bounces.