You may already have realised that Google Analytics 4 doesn’t track bounce rate like the older Universal Analytics. But having no Bounce Rate in GA4 isn’t the bad news it might seem at first because other metrics are available that are more valuable than Bounce Rate.
Here at Ditto Digital, we have for some time been seeing the trend for long, in-depth content with a very high Bounce Rate of 95+% consistently ranking very well (often in the Number 1 spot) for our clients. Yes, you read that right!
And why? Because pages where we observed this happening had very long values for the average time spent on the page – often between 5 – 8 minutes. So, what does that tell us? That a visitor found what they were looking for, spent a long time reading the information, then left the website.
Dwelling too much on the high bounce rate would have given us the wrong idea about this level of user engagement, when, in fact, users were spending a very long time (by online standards) reading our clients’ content (a big thumbs up to our team of copywriters!)
That goes some way to explaining why Google Analytics 4 does not measure Bounce Rate but instead uses a metric called User Engagement that allows you to see how visitors behave on a website.
So, don’t worry about losing Bounce Rate in GA4, instead start monitoring the User Engagement metric for improved data insights.
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