How to Find Bounce Rate in Google Analytics

Bounce rate is back in Google Analytics 4, but it's not the same metric you remember from Universal Analytics. If you've been looking for it in your standard reports, you have to add it yourself. This article will show you exactly what the new bounce rate means, how to find it, and how to add it to your main GA4 reports so you can start analyzing your page and campaign performance.

What is Bounce Rate in GA4 (and How Is It Different)?

In the old days of Universal Analytics (UA), a "bounce" was a single-page session. If someone landed on your website, didn't click anywhere else, and left, that session was counted as a bounce. This created problems because it treated a person who landed on a blog post, read the entire thing for 10 minutes, and left satisfied the same as someone who landed, hated it, and left in 2 seconds.

Google Analytics 4 fixes this with a more meaningful definition. In GA4, bounce rate is the percentage of sessions that were not engaged. It's simply the inverse of a new metric called "Engagement Rate."

So, what's an "engaged session"? GA4 counts a session as engaged if the visitor does any one of the following:

• Stays on the page for longer than 10 seconds (you can adjust this timing).
• Triggers a conversion event (like a purchase or a form submission).
• Views at least two pages.

If a session doesn't meet at least one of these criteria, it's considered unengaged, and therefore, it's a "bounce." This is a much better way to measure actual user interest. Someone who spends 3 minutes reading your page is now rightfully considered engaged, even if they don't visit a second page.

How to Find Bounce Rate in Your GA4 Reports

By default, GA4 focuses on engagement rate and doesn't display bounce rate in most standard reports. If you've been hunting for it without success, don't worry - it's not hidden, you just need to add it to the report view yourself. This process is called "customizing a report."

Let's walk through how to add it to one of the most useful reports: the Pages and screens report.

Step 1: Navigate to Your Chosen Report

First, log in to your Google Analytics 4 property. In the left-hand navigation menu, go to Reports > Engagement > Pages and screens. This report shows you performance metrics for your individual site pages.

You can also apply this same method to other reports, such as the Acquisition > Traffic acquisition report to see bounce rates by channel.

Step 2: Customize the Report

In the top-right corner of the report interface, you'll see a pencil icon. This is the Customize report button. Click it.

Step 3: Add the Bounce Rate Metric

After clicking the pencil icon, a customization panel will slide out from the right. Under the "Report Data" section, click on Metrics.

This will show you the list of metrics currently included in your report. At the bottom of this list, click Add metric.

Step 4: Select Bounce Rate

A search box and list of available metrics will appear. Type "Bounce Rate" into the search bar, or scroll down until you find it. Click on Bounce rate to add it to your report.

Once you select it, it will appear in the list of metrics. You can drag and drop it to change its position in the report. It's often helpful to place it right next to "Engagement rate" to see the relationship between the two metrics clearly.

Once you are happy with the order, click the blue Apply button at the bottom of the panel.

Step 5: Save Your Changes

You will now see a preview of the report with the "Bounce rate" column included. To make this change permanent, you need to save it. Click the blue Save button in the top-right corner.

You'll get two options:

1. Save changes to current report: This overwrites the default report in your GA4 property.
2. Save as a new report: This creates a copy of the report with your changes, leaving the original default report untouched.

Generally, it's best to choose Save as a new report. Give it a descriptive name like "Page Performance with Bounce Rate". This approach keeps your default reports clean and makes your custom version easy to find later in the 'Library' section of GA4.

Once you save it, your new report is ready to use! You can now easily access this customized view to monitor bounce rates across your website's pages anytime you want.

What Is a "Good" Bounce Rate?

This is one of the most common questions in web analytics, and the answer is always the same: it depends.

There is no universal "good" bounce rate. A 75% bounce rate might be excellent for one page and terrible for another. Instead of chasing a specific number, focus on understanding the context behind your bounce rate.

Consider the Page's Purpose

A blog post where a user finds an answer and leaves is expected to have a higher bounce rate than a product category page designed to encourage further clicking. A "Contact Us" page or a store locator page with a phone number might have a very high bounce rate, and that's perfectly fine - the user got what they needed and left.

Factor in the Traffic Source

Users arriving from a branded Google search are often deep into the buying process and may have a very low bounce rate. In contrast, visitors coming from a social media ad after seeing an interesting picture are more likely to browse briefly and leave, resulting in a higher bounce rate.

Focus on Trends, Not Just Numbers

The most important thing is to monitor your bounce rate over time. Is the bounce rate for a key landing page suddenly spiking? That's a red flag. Did a new blog post launch with a much lower bounce rate than average? That's a sign that the content and audience are well-matched.

How to Use Bounce Rate for Actionable Insights

Finding the bounce rate is just the first step. The real value comes from using it to ask "why" and uncover opportunities to improve your website experience and marketing efforts.

1. Identify Underperforming Landing Pages

Run your customized Pages and screens report and sort by "Views" to see your most popular pages. Now, look at the bounce rates for those pages. A page with high traffic but a staggeringly high bounce rate needs immediate attention. This combination often points to a disconnect between user expectation and reality. Ask yourself:

• Does the ad creative or the search result title accurately describe what's on the page?
• Is the content hard to read or is the page loading too slowly?
• Is the call-to-action unclear?

2. Evaluate Your Traffic Channels

Add bounce rate to your Traffic acquisition report in GA4. Compare the performance across different channels like Organic Search, Paid Social, Email, and Direct. If your campaign on Facebook Ads has a 90% bounce rate, it might indicate your ad targeting is too broad or your landing page isn't aligned with the ad creative. High bounce rates from a specific channel signal that the traffic quality may be low or your message isn't resonating with that audience.

3. Optimize for User Segments

Dig deeper by comparing bounce rates across different segments. In GA4's "Explore" reports, you can build your own analysis to compare bounce rates by device (mobile vs. desktop), country, or other custom audiences. You may discover that your bounce rate on mobile devices is significantly higher than on desktop, which could point to a poor mobile user experience or design issues that need fixing.

Final Thoughts

Understanding bounce rate in GA4 means shifting your thinking from the old definition to the new, engagement-focused approach. Because it isn't shown by default, knowing how to add this metric by customizing your reports is a fundamental skill for getting a clearer picture of how users interact with your site.

Navigating the Google Analytics interface to customize reports can feel clunky, and once you start asking follow-up questions, you often have to build entirely new reports. We built Graphed to solve this by connecting directly to your Google Analytics account and letting you create reports and find answers using plain English. Instead of saving different report views, you can just ask, "Show me my top 10 pages by bounce rate this month" and get an answer instantly, all without flipping through a single menu and get an interactive, real-time dashboard of just the information you need in seconds, rather than digging around yourself.