The percentage of website visitors who leave a page without taking any further action — clicking through to another page, submitting a form, or engaging further — commonly measured at the page or session level.
Why it matters
A high bounce rate can indicate a mismatch between what brought a visitor to the page (an ad, a search result) and what the page actually delivers, though bounce rate alone doesn't always distinguish between someone leaving because they were disappointed and someone leaving because they instantly found the one piece of information they needed.
In a sentence
"Bounce rate on that landing page was unusually high, which prompted us to check whether the ad copy was setting the wrong expectation about what the page offered."
Related terms
- Antonyms: Engagement, conversion (a visitor taking further action, rather than leaving immediately).
- Often confused with: Exit rate (bounce rate specifically measures single-page sessions where no further action was taken at all; exit rate measures the percentage of visits that ended on a given page, regardless of how many other pages were visited earlier in that same session).