Yesterday I talked about the issues with the ‘bounce rate’ metric in Google Analytics and why they are probably the reason that it’s being given a back seat in the new Google Analytics 4.
Bounce rate is still available in GA4, but it’s now the inverse of a new metric called ‘engagement rate’, which assesses visits a little differently. Engagement rate isn’t far off a custom metric which we’ve created for our Google Ads clients, to measure the effectiveness of their adverts. We’ve been using this for many years, so we’ve taken that as a major vote of confidence!
Google defines an ‘engaged session’ as “a session that lasts longer than 10 seconds, (or) has a conversion event, or has at least 2 pageviews or screenviews.”
So the bounce rate metric, which formerly just meant a single-page visit, is now a visit which is under 10 seconds and only involves one page and doesn’t have any ‘conversion event’.
In GA4, you can see the two metrics in both the reports section and the ‘explorations’. For example, if you go to the Pages and Screens report, you can customise the report (with the pencil ‘edit’ icon) to include the ‘engagement rate’ metric.