Bounce rate
Bounce rate is the share of visits that end on the first page without the visitor doing anything else, such as opening a second page or completing a goal.
Worked example (made-up numbers)
Your homepage gets 400 visits in a week. 260 of them leave without opening another page or clicking your signup button. The bounce rate for the homepage is 260 ÷ 400 = 65%.
Split by source: visits from a Reddit thread bounce at 45%, visits from a launch site at 80%. The total hides the more useful fact: one source sends people who look around, the other sends people who leave.
When a high number is fine
Bounce rate punishes pages that answer the question on the spot. A pricing page that tells someone what they wanted, a blog post read to the end, a docs page with the one command they needed: all can bounce and still have done their job. Tools measure bounce differently too; some count a long read without a click as a bounce, some don’t.
It matters most on pages whose job is to lead somewhere: a landing page whose only purpose is signups, or a homepage that should send people deeper.
Why it matters when you’re starting out
Early on, bounce rate is most useful as a mismatch detector. When people from one source leave at once, the page didn’t match what the link promised, or the link reached the wrong people. That’s cheaper to fix than the product: change the headline to say what the post said, or stop posting there.
How to measure it
- Decide what counts as not bouncing: a second page, or a goal such as a signup click.
- For each landing page, divide the visits that did neither by all visits that started there.
- Compare by source and by page, not only in total.
In Nordva Launch
Launch shows bounce rate and time on site next to visitors, and counts a visit as a bounce when it doesn’t reach a second page. It needs visits that may carry a visitor id (the auto mode outside the EEA, the UK and Switzerland, or after consent). In the no-cookie mode, visits are still counted but bounce rate isn’t available, because the script can’t tell whether two page views belong to the same visit. Goals, such as data-nordva-goal="signup" on your button, show the other half: how many visitors did the thing the page is for.