A short guide to bounce rate

Most teams know this matters. Fewer have decided who owns it. Everything we would tell a client about bounce rate in the time it takes to drink a coffee.

Measurement is only useful when someone has agreed in advance what they would do differently. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.

Why this earns attention

A high bounce rate is not automatically bad. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.

The practical version

Context and page type change what it means. The reasoning matters more than the rule, because the rule has exceptions. Write the reasoning down alongside the decision, because the reasoning is what changes first.

The mistakes we see most

Engagement time is usually the better signal. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped. The failure mode is not doing it wrong, it is doing it once and assuming it stays done.

In practice

Data you do not trust is worse than no data, because it gets quoted anyway. Three things worth confirming about bounce rate before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Context and page type change what it means — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Pick the one that would hurt most if it failed, and start there.