What is Time on Site and Bounce Rate?

time on site and bounce rate
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Last updated on August 13th, 2024 at 03:38 pm

Time on Site and Bounce Rate are popular metrics that website owners like to track. If you manage your website or blog marketing, chances are you’ve been curious as to how well your site is doing, and how many people have actually interacted with it. Using a popular analytics tool like Google Analytics, you’ll see a couple of different metric reports.

However, since the launch of Google Analytics 4, these metrics are no longer measured and reported as they used to be. You might not even know or understand what some of them really mean. So how do you track these? In this article, we’ll be looking at Time on Site and Bounce Rate, and answering the question, “What is time on site and bounce rate?

Google Analytics

Time on Site

is basically what it sounds like – the average time in minutes or seconds that a visitor spends on your page. Don’t take this report too seriously, however, as this particular report can be quite inaccurate or misleading due to a few factors. You don’t really know if the visitor was actually interacting with your site, or just forgot to close it.

The average time on site isn’t the most accurately analyzed data due to factors such as a visitor keeping your page open in another tab or window while browsing other sites or leaving your page open on their browser when they get up to make a snack. But, it is useful when determining if someone even read your content at all. For example, if someone spent less than 10 seconds on your page, you can be pretty sure they didn’t bother to read anything.

In Google Analytics 4, this metric has been changed to an overall measurement of Average Engagement Time per session. This report can be found by going to Reports > Life cycle > Engagement > Engagement Overview.

Bounce Rate

is the percentage of visitors who leave your site without interaction. A bounce is when someone opens your website and then exits without clicking on any additional pages. A high bounce rate isn’t always a bad thing. Depending on the purpose of the page, it could be perfectly normal for people to close the page when they’re done.

Bounce Rate

How is Bounce Rate calculated?

According to this Google Analytics help page, “a bounce is calculated specifically as a session that triggers only a single request to the Analytics server, such as when a user opens a single page on your site and then exits without triggering any other requests to the Analytics server during that session.

In GA4, the bounce rate is the percentage of sessions that were not engaged.

Whether your bounce rate is a good or bad thing that it’s high or low can be determined by your site’s purpose. If the purpose of the visited page was to provide an answer or submit a support ticket, then it isn’t a bad thing if the visitor exits your page after receiving the help they visited for; therefore resulting in a higher bounce rate. In fact, it’s perfectly normal to close a page once you’re satisfied with the result. But in the case where your page’s purpose is to link to a products page or enter details for a newsletter subscription, then a high bounce rate is a bad thing because the page’s purpose of generating interaction isn’t being fulfilled, but rather ignored and closed down.

If that’s the case, you may want to use this information to optimize your page better and make its purpose more clear and inviting.

You can add Bounce Rate to detailed reports in GA4 by following this guideline from Google.

Conclusion

What is time on site and bounce rate? These are metrics of site analytics that’s purpose is to tell you how people interact with your page if any interaction is made at all. Time on site is how long a visitor spent on your page, and bounce rate is how many visitors exit your page without clicking on additional pages or links.

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