What is bounce rate?
Classically (Universal Analytics era), bounce rate was the percentage of sessions on your site that consisted of exactly one pageview with no further interaction. A user who landed on /pricing, read it for ten minutes, and closed the tab counted as a bounce. So did a user who landed and left after two seconds.
The formula:
bounce_rate(page) = single_page_sessions_starting_on_page / sessions_starting_on_page
Bounce rate is per landing page in most reports — it answers "of the people who started here, how many never went anywhere else?"
What is exit rate?
Exit rate is the percentage of sessions that ended on a page, out of all sessions that included that page at any point.
exit_rate(page) = sessions_ending_on_page / sessions_including_page
Exit rate is per page, not per landing page. A user who entered on /home, browsed /features, and left from /pricing contributed one exit to /pricing and zero bounces to it.
How are bounce rate and exit rate related?
The cleanest way to remember it:
- A bounce is a session with exactly one pageview — start and end on the same page
- An exit is the last pageview of any session, however long it was
Therefore every bounce is also an exit (the user entered and left from the same page, so they exited from it). But most exits are not bounces, because most sessions have more than one pageview.
| Bounce rate | Exit rate | |
|---|---|---|
| Denominator | Sessions that started on this page | Sessions that included this page |
| Numerator | Sessions with one pageview | Sessions whose last page was this one |
| Counts multi-page sessions? | No | Yes |
| Reported per | Landing page | Any page |
| High value means | The page failed to engage entry traffic | Users tend to leave from this page |
| Always true | Bounce rate ≤ exit rate | Exit rate ≥ bounce rate |
How did GA4 change bounce rate?
GA4 redefined bounce rate so it is no longer about pageviews at all. In GA4:
- An engaged session is a session that lasted longer than 10 seconds, OR triggered a conversion event, OR had at least 2 pageviews/screenviews
- Engagement rate is the percentage of sessions that were engaged
- Bounce rate is
1 - engagement_rate
So a GA4 bounce is a non-engaged session: short, single-page, no conversion. A user who lands on a long-form blog post, scrolls for 30 seconds, and leaves is not a bounce in GA4 even though they would have been one in Universal Analytics. The 10-second engagement threshold is the single biggest reason GA4 bounce rates look much lower than the UA numbers teams remember.
GA4 still reports exit rate, defined the same way as before: sessions ending on a page divided by sessions including the page.
When should you look at which?
- Use bounce rate to evaluate landing pages. It tells you whether a page can hold the attention of cold traffic on its own.
- Use exit rate to evaluate any page in the middle or end of a journey. It tells you whether a page is the last thing users see before they leave, regardless of how they got there.
A few practical examples:
- A thank-you page should have a high exit rate. That is success — the user finished what they came to do.
- A pricing page in the middle of a checkout flow should have a low exit rate. A high one is a leak.
- A blog post ranking in organic search should be evaluated on bounce rate (and engagement time), not exit rate. The denominator is the people who landed there.
- A search results page with a high exit rate but low bounce rate means users are looking, not finding, and giving up.
Common gotchas
- High bounce isn't always bad. A blog post that answers a question completely in 30 seconds will bounce 90% of the time and that is healthy.
- Engagement events change bounce rate. Adding a
scrollorclickevent in GA4 can drop bounce rate by 30 points without any UX change. The number went down because the definition changed, not the behavior. - Exit rate ranks pages, not pages over time. Comparing the exit rate of two pages today is easier than comparing one page's exit rate before and after a change, because total session volume affects the denominator.
- Single-pageview multi-tab sessions can be misclassified as bounces if the user opened a link in a new tab; the original tab never recorded a second event.
How it relates to CloseTrace
CloseTrace reports both metrics per page and lets you replay any bounced or exited session to see what the user actually did. You get the number from analytics and the reason from session replay in the same view, so a high exit rate stops being a mystery within minutes.