Bounce Rate in GA4: How to Track Your Website’s Bounce Rate

Wondering why you can’t find your bounce rate in GA4? If you can’t track your bounce rate in Google Analytics 4, how do you track user engagement on your pages?

Google Analytics 4, or GA4, is the newest version of Google Analytics. For people who’ve been using Universal Analytics, it’s challenging to switch to GA4. There are some new metrics to get used to, and some old ones that are no longer included.

In GA4, bounce rate has been replaced by other engagement metrics. However, if you want to check your bounce rate, there is still a way to find it in GA4.

In this article, we’ll talk about why bounce rate was removed from the main reports in GA4, how you can still access it, and GA4 metrics you can use to gauge engagement that aren’t bounce rate.

GA4 Bounce Rate: Why Is It Gone?

In Universal Analytics, many users kept an eye on their bounce rate as an indicator of how engaging their page (or whole site) was to visitors who landed there. Bounce rate showed how many visitors left the site without clicking on any more pages or completing any conversions. Basically, it meant they maybe read your page (or didn’t even do that), then left.

Bounce rate was calculated using the following formula:

Bounce rate of a page = Total number of single-page sessions / Total number of entrances on the page.

When GA4 was first released, one of the first things users noticed was that bounce rate had disappeared. Although many website owners and marketers used the bounce rate metric as a measure of success, it did come with some flaws. So, when Google designed their new version of Analytics, they chose to replace bounce rate with engagement metrics, which give you a better idea of how your pages and content are really performing.

However, Google added a bounce rate metric back into GA4 in July of 2022 in one of their updates. It’s not a main metric in their reports, but it is one that you can access.

Bounce Rate vs. Engagement Metrics

A high bounce rate in Universal Analytics meant that too many people were landing on your page, then leaving without performing any events or visiting any other pages. For some websites and some content, it made sense to track bounce rate. For others, though, it wasn’t a great way to tell how well the page was actually doing.

For instance, let’s say you have a long, well-written piece of content that dives into a subject and answers questions. If a visitor landed on your page, spent 5 minutes reading through the whole thing, then left, that would be counted as a bounce. Even though that visitor was super engaged by your content, you’d have no way of knowing that by looking at bounce rate.

To help clear that up, GA4 includes a new metric called Engaged sessions. Engaged sessions are sessions that include an event (like a click or form submission), or more than one pageview, or last more than 10 seconds. That timing piece makes engagement more meaningful to track than bounce rate ever was.

Other engagement metrics you can use in GA4 include engagement rate, average engagement time, and engagement time per page. For more on engagement metrics, check out Top 5 User Engagement Metrics for Your Website Explained.

Where to Find Bounce Rate in GA4

Although bounce rate isn’t a metric in any of the standard GA4 reports, you can find it a couple different ways.

Before we dive into our tutorial, though, note that bounce rate in GA4 will be different from Universal Analytics. Because GA4 counts sessions lasting longer than 10 seconds as engaged, there will be sessions in GA4 that are not counted as bounces, but would have been counted in Universal Analytics.

In GA4, bounce rate is simply sessions that aren’t engaged. So, they’re sessions that didn’t last longer than 10 seconds, and the user didn’t click anything that fired an event, and they didn’t view any more pages.

Add Bounce Rate to Pages and Screens Report

Want to be able to see your bounce rate in your main pages report, just like you could in Universal Analytics? You’re in luck – unlike Universal Analytics, you can customize your core reports in GA4. Add metrics to the reports, or even remove ones you don’t use (like Revenue if your site isn’t eCommerce) to make the reports right for your site.

Step 1: To add bounce rate, navigate to Engagement » Pages and screens:

Step 2: Now click the pencil icon in the upper right of your screen:

Step 3: Next, a sidebar will open. Click on Metrics:

Step 4: In the sidebar options that appear, click on the bottom Add metric option, then start typing “bounce” to find and select Bounce rate. 

Step 5: Once it’s been selected, you’ll see Bounce rate added to the list of Metrics. Click Apply.

Step 6: Click the Save button. A dropdown will appear – choose Save changes to current report.

Step 7: A popup will appear asking if you’re sure you want to save your changes. Click Save.

That’s it! Exit the edit screen by clicking the Back arrow:

You can now scroll over in your Pages and screens table to view the bounce rate for each page.

And that’s it!

We hope you liked our article on how to track your site’s bounce rate in Google Analytics 4. We think you might also like to check out 9 Google Analytics 4 SEO Hacks to Increase Search Traffic.

Or, to learn how to reduce your bounce rate, read How to Reduce Bounce Rate: 6 Simple, Proven Methods.

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