Glossary
What is bounce rate?
Bounce rate is the share of sessions that contained exactly one page view. The visitor arrived, looked, and left without loading a second page.
The thing it cannot see
Time. A session with one page view is a bounce whether the visitor left after two seconds or read for twenty minutes.
That is not a limitation of any particular tool, it is what a page-view-based definition can know. Without a second page load or an engagement event, the browser never reports how long somebody stayed.
So the metric conflates two opposite outcomes: somebody who bounced off a page that was wrong for them, and somebody who got exactly what they came for on the first page and had no reason to click.
Which is why high is often fine
Three cases where a high bounce rate is the page working.
A blog post. Search brings somebody to one article, they read it, they leave. That is the article doing its job.
A documentation page. They came for a specific answer, found it, went back to their editor. A low bounce rate here would mean people cannot find things.
A contact or pricing page as a landing page. One page, one decision.
The case where it is genuinely bad is a page whose whole job is to move somebody onwards. There a bounce is a failure, and the number is actionable.
Segment before you judge. A site-wide bounce rate averages a blog that should bounce with a funnel that should not, and the average describes neither.
GA4 changed the definition
Worth knowing if you are comparing across a migration.
Universal Analytics bounce rate was the single-page-view definition above. GA4 bounce rate is one minus engagement rate, where an engaged session lasted at least ten seconds, had two or more page views, or included a conversion.
So a GA4 bounce is a session that did none of those. The two numbers are not comparable and should never share an axis across the migration date.
GA4's is arguably the better definition, because the ten-second rule gives it a crude view of the time the old one could not see.
Where the number moves without behaviour changing
A cookie banner that fires an event. If a consent interaction registers as activity, bounces fall overnight with nobody reading more.
Anchor links. A same-page anchor is not a page view, so a table of contents does not rescue a bounce rate. Correct behaviour, and it catches people who expected otherwise.
A single-page app with no route tracking. If your router does not fire a page view on navigation, every session has exactly one and your bounce rate is near 100%. That is an instrumentation reading, not a traffic reading, and it is the first thing to check when the figure looks absurd.
Read it with volume
Bounce rate falling while visitors fall is not an improvement, it is a smaller and more committed audience. Falling while visitors rise is the genuinely good case.
Bounce rate in Notch Metrics
Plausible bounce rate uses the single-page-view definition and is reported as a ratio, bucketed in your Plausible site's own timezone.
Place it beside unique visitors and pageviews.