The analytics community celebrated (rightfully so) when the bounce rate metric disappeared with the creation of GA4. There was a mixture of excitement from analysts who meet with clients day-to-day and a combination of dread from business owners who thought it was the most important metric on earth. Clearly, speaking with experts, the consensus was clear. It was a positive move.

Suddenly, a few months later, Google announced they were re-introducing specific metrics to the GA community. One of those metrics they’ve re-introduced is bounce rate. There’s good and bad news.

The Good News – Engagement Rate

With the release of GA4, Google decided to modernize its analytics to meet the criteria they’ve been selling us for years. As part of that, they introduced an engagement rate metric. According to Google’s help center, the engagement rate is “Percentage of Engaged Sessions. Engaged Sessions is the number of sessions that lasted longer than 10 seconds, had a conversion event, or had at least 2 pageviews or screenviews.” Most industry experts welcomed the alignment of an engagement metric to the new event-based tracking. This metric would allow for easier conversations and transitions as it was an almost one-for-one replacement of bounce rate.

The Bad News – Google Heard The Panic

Google has been promising updates to GA4 as it turns the corner to under one year from the retirement of Universal Analytics. Less than a week ago, Google announced that they’d be bringing back bounce rate as a metric available for tracking. Inevitably, non-web business-facing users will continue to ask, “what should my metric for bounce rate be?”

The Outcome

The truth is, though, Google has solved the problem for the web industry. While they might call this metric “bounce rate,” the definition has vastly changed from its original. In Universal Analytics, the definition was as follows:

Percentage of single page sessions in which there was no interaction with the page. A bounced session has a duration of 0 seconds. For example, if a user visits your website and reviews content on your homepage for several minutes, but leaves without clicking on any links or triggering any events being recorded as interaction events, then the session will count as a bounce.

Google Help Center

The new version of Google’s bounce rate is now being defined as:

Percentage of sessions that were not engaged sessions. For example, if a user visits your website, reviews content on your homepage for a few seconds, and then leaves, then the session will count as a bounce.

Google Help Center

The biggest difference is Google has not removed itself from the importance of engagement. The new bounce rate is essentially an inverse of their new engagement rate. It might take time, but as an industry, we are heading to a world without a bounce rate, and it’s best to get there as soon as possible.