Bounce rate

Updated 2026-11-02

Definition

Bounce rate is the share of sessions that include only one pageview. The visitor arrived, saw one page and left without loading another.

The formula is one-page sessions divided by all sessions.

Example

This example uses made-up numbers. Your site gets 10,000 sessions in a month, and 5,500 of them view a single page. Your bounce rate is 5,500 / 10,000 = 55%.

Now split it by page. Your pricing page has a 30% bounce rate. A blog post has a 75% bounce rate. That blog post may still be fine. Someone could read the whole article, get what they came for, and leave.

How to read it

A bounce isn't always bad. A visitor who reads a long guide for six minutes counts as a bounce if they never click through. So does someone who finds your phone number and calls you. Bounce rate alone can't separate those people from someone who left after two seconds.

Bounce rate is more useful when you compare similar pages, or the same page across traffic sources. If paid traffic bounces at 80% from a page where organic bounces at 40%, your ad and your page may not match.

Other tools define it differently. GA4, for instance, treats a bounce as a session that wasn't engaged, so its numbers can differ from a pageview-based count.

How Headstream measures it

Headstream defines bounce rate as the share of sessions with exactly one pageview. Known bots and any paths or IP addresses you exclude are left out, and repeat deliveries of the same event are removed. It's labeled an estimate, since session counts are estimates at scale.

For a page that holds attention, scroll depth from heatmaps gives more detail. A Why this number page shows the definition and the raw rows behind it. See the methodology page.