“We need to reduce the bounce rate,” “The bounce rate is very high”… are phrases we’ve been hearing for years.
Recently, with the launch of Google Analytics 4, these phrases have evolved into “What happened to the bounce rate?” “Where do I find the bounce rate in GA4?”
Google has finally decided to start seeing the glass half full, rather than half empty. The legendary bounce rate, which represents the percentage of sessions in which users leave the site without any interaction, has now been replaced by its counterpart: the “engagement rate.”
An engaged session is defined as a session that lasts more than 10 seconds, has a conversion event, or has at least 2 views of a page or screen.
The engagement rate is the percentage of sessions with engagement that have occurred on a website or mobile application. The bounce rate is the opposite: it is the percentage of sessions in which there have been no interactions.
We can say then that, for example, a bounce rate of 30% is equivalent to an engagement rate of 70%.
What is the Engagement Rate used for?
The percentage of sessions with engagement is one of the first indications of the quality of the traffic we receive on our website or mobile application. It is expected that users access the site with the intention of performing some subsequent interaction, and this indicator allows us to see just that.
Let’s look at the following example:
From this table, we can observe that some traffic sources such as “Direct,” “Cross-Network,” or “Paid Search” derive higher-quality traffic than others, as their engagement rate is above the average of 88.98%.
In summary
The engagement rate, a new positively connoted metric incorporated into Google Analytics 4, helps us evaluate the quality of traffic received on our websites.