What Is a Good Bounce Rate in GA4?

Google Analytics says 58% of your visits bounced. Is that bad? Every article seems to give a different "good" range, and many of them were written for a version of Analytics that no longer exists.

There isn't one good number. It depends on what the page is for and on how the bounce is counted. Here's how to judge yours.

What GA4 counts as a bounce

In GA4 a bounce is simply a visit that wasn't engaged. A visit counts as engaged if any one of three things happens: it lasts longer than 10 seconds, it includes a key event such as a sent form, or the visitor opens a second page.

Bounce rate is the share of visits that passed none of the tests. Engagement rate is the rest, so the two always add up to 100%. Google's help page gives the same definition with an example.

Why old benchmarks mislead

Universal Analytics, the version before GA4, counted any visit that saw one page as a bounce, however long it lasted. Someone who read your whole article and left was a bounce. Google stopped processing data in Universal Analytics in July 2023.

Under GA4's rule, that reader is engaged. So the same site usually shows a lower bounce rate now than it did then. A benchmark built on the old rule can make your figure look better than it is. If you find a "good range" online, check which version it measured.

So what is a good bounce rate?

It depends on the job of the page.

A page that exists to give out a phone number or opening hours can bounce a lot and still work. The visitor got the answer in five seconds and rang you. Unless that tap is tracked as a key event, it's a bounce.

A blog post is different. Anyone who reads for more than 10 seconds is already engaged, so a high bounce rate there means people left almost at once. That's worth a look.

Landing pages, product pages and your home page should send people somewhere. On those, lower is better.

Is a 70% bounce rate bad?

In GA4, 70% means seven in ten visits lasted 10 seconds or less, saw one page and did nothing you track. On most pages that's high. Before you worry, check that one channel, one device or one page isn't dragging the whole figure up.

Compare with yourself, not the internet

Your own site is the best benchmark you'll get. Start with the site average, then look page by page, by channel and by device. Watch how each one moves from month to month.

A sudden jump across every page rarely means your visitors changed overnight. More often a tag has gone missing from part of the site, or a burst of junk traffic has arrived. Check the tracking first.

Where to find it

Most GA4 reports don't show bounce rate by default. If you're an editor or administrator, open the Pages and screens report, choose Customize report and add the Bounce rate metric.

In the Traffic acquisition report, look at Organic Search on its own. Those are the visits your Search Console clicks turn into, though the two figures never match exactly.

When a high bounce rate is worth fixing

Three causes cover most cases.

The page doesn't match the search. Check which searches bring people to it in Search Console. If someone searched for emergency repairs and landed on a page about new installations, they'll leave.

The page is slow. On a phone, ten seconds goes quickly while a heavy page loads. Our guide to page speed covers what to check.

There's no obvious next step. If visitors can't see where to go or what to do, they go back to Google.

Don't turn it into a target

Bounce rate explains other numbers. On its own it doesn't tell you whether SEO is working, which is why we treat it as a diagnostic in our guide to SEO KPIs. Google has also said more than once that it doesn't use Google Analytics data to rank pages.

Avoid the tricks that make it look better. Marking something every visitor does, such as a page view, as a key event turns every visit into an engaged one. The bounce rate drops to almost nothing and stops telling you anything.

Seeing it next to its causes

Duality shows your bounce rate and engagement rate for every week and month, beside your Search Console clicks, your rankings and your page speed. When the rate jumps, you can see what else moved that week. See what's in the report.