What Is a Good Bounce Rate?

A good bounce rate is roughly 60-80% for content and blog sites, 30-50% for ecommerce, and 60-90% for landing pages — but these are loose, approximate ranges, not targets. The bigger catch: GA4's bounce rate is defined completely differently from Universal Analytics' version, so a "good" number under one tool's definition can look bad under the other for identical traffic. Compare bounce rate within the same tool and definition, not across them.

GA4 bounce rate is not UA bounce rate

In Universal Analytics, a bounce was any session with exactly one interaction hit — someone viewed one page and left without triggering a second recorded action, regardless of how long they stayed on that one page. A visitor who spent five minutes reading a single article and then closed the tab still counted as a bounce under UA's definition.

GA4 flips the definition. Bounce rate in GA4 = 100% − engagement rate, and a session is engaged if it lasts 10+ seconds, includes a key event, or includes 2+ pageviews. See engaged sessions in GA4 for the full breakdown of that threshold. So the same five-minute single-page read that bounced under UA now counts as engaged — not bounced — under GA4, because it cleared the 10-second threshold easily.

This means GA4 bounce rates are typically lower than UA bounce rates were for the same site and same traffic, purely from the definition change — not because visitor behavior actually improved. Comparing a pre-migration UA bounce rate to a post-migration GA4 bounce rate is comparing two different metrics that happen to share a name.

Rough benchmarks by site type

These are approximate reference points, not firm targets — treat them as a general sense of range, not a pass/fail line: Blogs and content sites often run 60-80% bounce rate under GA4's definition, since a lot of traffic arrives for one article, reads it, and leaves without visiting a second page — but if that read takes more than 10 seconds, it's still counted as engaged rather than bounced. Ecommerce sites tend to run lower, roughly 30-50%, since browsing typically involves multiple page views (category to product to cart) within a session. Landing pages, especially single-purpose ones built for a single call to action, often run high — 60-90% — because a visitor either converts within the same page/session or leaves without navigating elsewhere.

These ranges vary widely by traffic source, too — a visitor arriving from a highly targeted paid ad tends to behave differently than one arriving from a broad organic search, even on the same page.

Why cross-tool comparisons mislead

Every analytics tool defines "bounce" slightly differently — some use time-based thresholds, some use interaction counts, some use scroll depth as a qualifying signal. A 40% bounce rate in one tool and a 55% bounce rate in another, measuring the same traffic on the same site, doesn't mean one tool is more accurate — it usually means the two tools are answering slightly different questions.

The useful comparison is always within one tool, one definition, over time: is this page's bounce rate trending up or down against its own history, not against a number from a different platform or a generic industry benchmark.

FAQ

What is a good bounce rate in GA4?

Roughly 60-80% for blogs and content sites, 30-50% for ecommerce, and 60-90% for landing pages — treat these as loose approximate ranges, not firm targets, since bounce rate varies by traffic source and site type.

Is GA4 bounce rate the same as Universal Analytics bounce rate?

No. UA counted any single-interaction session as a bounce regardless of time spent. GA4 defines bounce rate as the inverse of engagement rate, where a session needs 10+ seconds, a key event, or 2+ pageviews to count as engaged (not bounced) — a fundamentally different calculation.

Why did my bounce rate drop after migrating from UA to GA4?

Almost certainly the definition change, not a real behavior shift. GA4's engagement-based definition counts many single-page sessions as engaged if they lasted 10+ seconds, while UA counted them all as bounces.

Can I compare my bounce rate to industry benchmarks?

Only loosely. Different tools and even different GA4 configurations (like a custom engagement timeout) produce different bounce rates for similar traffic, so cross-tool or cross-site benchmarks are rough at best. Trend your own bounce rate over time instead.

Related terms

• What Are Engaged Sessions in GA4?GA4's bounce rate, flipped and renamed — here's what actually counts as "engaged."
• What Is Average Session Duration in GA4?GA4 measures engaged time, not "tab open" time — and that changes what's a good number.
• What Is a Session in Google Analytics?Why your GA4 session count doesn't match what Universal Analytics used to report.