Bounce rate calculator
Calculate bounce rate from sessions and single-page sessions, and get the GA4 engagement rate alongside it. Free, no account, nothing leaves your browser.
- Free, no account
- Runs in your browser
- Nothing is sent to us
Your numbers
Every session in the period, bounced or not.
Sessions where the visitor saw one page and left without a second interaction.
Enter total sessions and single-page sessions. Nothing is sent anywhere.
The formula
bounce rate = (single-page sessions / total sessions) × 100A bounce is a session with exactly one page and no further interaction. The calculator also reports the inverse, engagement rate, because GA4 reports that instead and people arrive holding one number needing the other.
The definition moved, so old comparisons do not hold
This trips up anyone comparing against historical numbers.
Universal Analytics counted a bounce as a session with a single interaction hit. Time on page was irrelevant, because with nothing to compare a timestamp against, a ten-minute read and a two-second exit were identical.
GA4 inverted it. A session is engaged if it lasts ten seconds or more, or fires a conversion event, or has two or more pageviews. Bounce rate is what is left over.
So a page where people read for thirty seconds and leave bounced under the old definition and does not under the new one. If your bounce rate dropped dramatically when you migrated, nothing improved. The question changed.
Read it per page, never site-wide
A single site-wide bounce rate averages pages with opposite goals into a number that describes none of them.
The right comparison is against pages with the same job:
- Reference and documentation pages should bounce high. Someone searched an error message, found the answer, closed the tab. That is a success.
- Blog posts usually bounce high and that is fine, though a post that is meant to lead somewhere and does not is worth looking at.
- Landing and pricing pages should bounce low. A visitor who arrives with intent and leaves without acting is the actual problem this metric is good at surfacing.
- Home pages should bounce low, because their entire job is routing people onward.
When the number means something is broken
A few readings are diagnostic rather than descriptive:
Under about 10% on a content site. Almost certainly double-tracked pageviews. Check whether your tag is installed twice, or whether a single-page app is firing a pageview on both the route change and the initial load.
Above 95% on a page with links. Usually a tracking problem on the destination rather than a content problem on the source, or a broken layout on one device class.
A sudden jump on one date with no content change. Look at what deployed that day. A JavaScript error that stops the second pageview from firing looks exactly like everyone suddenly leaving.
What to look at instead
Bounce rate is a blunt instrument. If the question is “is this page working”, these answer it better:
- Scroll depth or read time, which distinguish a satisfied reader from an instant exit.
- Exit rate per page, which tells you where people leave a multi-page flow.
- Next page, which shows whether the page routes anywhere useful.
- Conversion rate for pages with a goal, which is the actual question underneath.
sonex reports bounce rate, visit duration and the pages people go to next side by side, so you can tell a satisfied exit from a failed one, without cookies and without a consent banner.
Frequently asked.
- How do you calculate bounce rate?
- Divide single-page sessions by total sessions and multiply by 100. Four thousand six hundred bounces from eight thousand four hundred sessions is roughly 55%. A bounce is a session where the visitor saw one page and left without a second interaction.
- What is a good bounce rate?
- It depends entirely on the page's job. A blog post or a documentation page that answers the question on the first screen should have a high bounce rate, because the visitor got what they came for and left satisfied. A pricing page with the same number is a problem. Judge it per page against pages with the same purpose.
- Why did GA4 remove bounce rate?
- GA4 replaced it with engagement rate, its inverse. An engaged session is one lasting ten seconds or more, or with a conversion event, or with two or more pageviews. Bounce rate in GA4 is simply a hundred minus the engagement rate, so a "10 second" timer changed what the number means compared with old Universal Analytics.
- Is a high bounce rate bad for SEO?
- Bounce rate is not a ranking factor and Google does not receive it from your analytics tool. It can correlate with things that do matter, such as a page not matching what the searcher wanted, but the number itself is not something search engines see or score.
- Why is my bounce rate suddenly near zero?
- Almost always double-tracked pageviews. If the tag fires twice, every session records two pageviews and nothing counts as a bounce. A bounce rate below about 10% on a content site is a measurement bug until proven otherwise.