Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who leave a website after viewing only a single page, without taking any further action or navigating anywhere else on the site.
Bounce rate is calculated from analytics data — typically Google Analytics — as the proportion of single-page sessions out of all sessions on a page or site. A high bounce rate isn't automatically bad: someone searching for a phone number, an opening time, or a quick factual answer might get exactly what they needed from one page and leave satisfied, which still counts as a bounce. Because of this ambiguity, most analytics platforms now favour related metrics like engagement rate or engaged sessions (which factor in time spent and whether any interaction happened) over a plain bounce rate, giving a fuller picture of whether a visit was actually useful to the visitor rather than just whether they viewed more than one page.
Bounce rate is a useful diagnostic signal when read in context — a high bounce rate on a page meant to guide visitors toward a next step (like a product or signup page) is worth investigating, while the same rate on a simple reference page might just mean the content answered the question efficiently.
No. It depends heavily on the page’s purpose. A high bounce rate on a page meant to funnel visitors toward a next action is worth investigating; the same rate on a quick-reference page that fully answers a question can be completely normal.
Google has said it doesn't use bounce rate from Google Analytics directly as a ranking factor, since it's not something Google's own crawlers or index has access to. It can still correlate with content quality issues worth investigating on your own.
Bounce rate only counts sessions where a single page was viewed and nothing else happened. Exit rate is the percentage of visits to a page that were the last page viewed in a session, regardless of how many pages came before it.
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