Bounce Rate Is Not There Any More

The metric everybody quoted

Bounce rate was the figure that appeared in every report and was understood by almost nobody who quoted it.

It measured the share of visits where somebody arrived, did not trigger any further interaction, and left.

The trouble was that it counted a person who read your entire opening hours page and then telephoned you as a bounce, because they had not clicked anything.

So a high number could mean the page failed, or that it answered the question immediately, and there was no way to tell them apart.

What replaced it

Engagement rate, which counts the opposite thing and is easier to interpret.

A session counts as engaged if it lasts beyond a short threshold, or includes more than one page view, or includes a conversion.

So the person reading your opening hours for ninety seconds is now engaged rather than bounced, which is a fairer description of what happened.

Engagement rate is the share of sessions meeting that test, and the two figures are roughly inverse: high engagement corresponds to what used to be low bounce.

Which means the direction of a good number has flipped, and that is the main thing to hold on to.

Why the change is an improvement

• Time counts, so reading is not a failure.
• Conversions count, so enquiring is not a bounce.
• It measures the good outcome rather than the bad one.
• It is harder to game with pointless interactions.
• It is defined in a way you can explain to somebody.

The first two matter most for a small service business, where the ideal visit is frequently one page, an answer found, and a phone call that no analytics system sees.

Do not compare the two

The practical rule, and it prevents a misleading conversation.

Engagement rate and bounce rate are not two views of the same measurement, so subtracting one from a hundred does not give you the other.

The thresholds differ, the definitions differ, and the two systems collect differently in the first place.

Which means comparing this year's engagement rate against last year's bounce rate produces a number with no meaning.

Treat the change as a fresh start for that particular figure: begin a new baseline now and compare against it going forward.

Anybody presenting a chart with both on it is presenting a chart that cannot be read.

A worked example

A business had spent two years worried about a bounce rate above eighty percent on their opening hours and location page.

They had tried adding links, related content, and a gallery to encourage people to click something.

None of it changed the outcome, and the page was doing exactly what it should: telling somebody where the business was, after which they left the site and drove there.

In the new system the same page showed a healthy engagement rate, because visitors were spending long enough on it to count.

The page had never been a problem. The metric had been describing success as failure for two years.

Their conclusion was that the added links had made the page worse in the service of a number that was measuring the wrong thing.

Neither figure is the important one

Worth saying while the subject is open.

Both bounce rate and engagement rate describe behaviour on the site rather than business outcomes.

A page can have excellent engagement and produce no enquiries, and a page with poor engagement can produce a call from every third visitor.

For a small business the figure that matters is how many people got in touch, which is why the conversion setup is worth more attention than this metric ever was.

Look at engagement rate to understand a page, and never report it as though it were a result.

Judge it per page, not per site

Because a site-wide figure averages pages doing entirely different jobs.

An article people read for four minutes, a contact page they use in fifteen seconds, and a service page they compare against two competitors should not be judged by one number.

Look at engagement by landing page, which tells you something actionable, and ignore the headline figure.

A low engagement rate on a page meant to be read is worth investigating. The same figure on a page meant to be used quickly is not a problem.

Ask what the page is for before deciding whether its number is bad, which is a question no report will ask for you.

What actually moves it

For a page where the figure is genuinely poor and should not be.

Speed, most reliably, since somebody who leaves before the page appears was never going to engage with it.

Matching what the visitor expected, which is usually a mismatch between an advertisement or a search result and what the page delivers.

Whether the answer they came for is visible without scrolling.

And whether there is a next step worth taking, since a page with nothing to do next produces exactly that.

Those four cover most cases, and none of them is served by adding links to encourage clicking.

The counter-case

There is a risk in treating the new metric as more meaningful than it is.

Engagement rate can be improved by making a page slower to use, since a visitor who takes longer to find something counts as engaged, and that is the opposite of an improvement.

The threshold for an engaged session is also arbitrary, and a visit a second under it is recorded identically to somebody who left instantly.

And for a business whose enquiries arrive by telephone, this whole family of measurements describes a fraction of what happens.

Use it to compare a page against itself over time, treat it as a diagnostic rather than a result, and keep counting enquiries.

What to do

1. Stop looking for bounce rate.
2. Learn that higher is now better.
3. Never compare it against your old bounce figures.
4. Start a fresh baseline from now.
5. Look at it by landing page, not site-wide.
6. Ask what each page is for before judging it.
7. Keep counting enquiries as the real measure.

Step three prevents the most common error in the first year, which is a chart showing two incompatible metrics as though they were one trend.

Reading traffic sources properly is covered in where your visitors came from.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.