A bounce is a visit with a single page view, which means that a user has landed on the site and then their visit has ended without them navigating to any further pages. 

Bounce Rate gives, of all the visits to a page, the percentage in which customers left without viewing another page. In our Adobe Analytics account this metric is called ‘Bounce Rate (Single Access)‘ and the calculation is;

[Single Page Visits / Entries]

For example, if the Homepage had 150 single page visits, and 30 bounces, it would have (30/150) = 20% Bounce Rate.

Essentially, this tells you that of all visits that started their session on the homepage, 20% of them left the site without viewing any other pages.

Bounce Rate (Single Access) is used in the Pages report. It can either be used to show bounce rate for a specific page or to rank all pages by bounce rate. It can be used to identify pages which may have a site performance issue or are not engaging or relevant for users. These pages can then be prioritised for review and optimisation.

If a page has a high bounce rate there may be several reasons behind it;

• The content isn’t relevant or what users expected, or is difficult to find.
• The page is slow to load and users give up waiting.
• There is an issue or defect with the page preventing users from progressing through their journey.
• There is no clear next step for users to progress.
• In some instances a high bounce rate may be expected, such as on a holding page or a blog post where further interaction with the site is not necessary.

If a page has a low bounce rate it suggests that it has no significant issues, and serves its purpose. However, if it is a high volume page it should still be reviewed regularly.

Bounce Rate: Weighted

Consider the below scenario;

Last week Page A had 5 entries and 4 single page visits, resulting in 80% bounce rate

Last week Page B has 3,000 entries and 1,500 single page visits, resulting in 50% bounce rate.

Which page should be prioritised for review?

If ranking by bounce rate, Page A would appear very high on the list, while Page B would be much lower down. However, only 4 customers bounced from Page A whereas 1,500 customers bounced from Page B.

Therefore, as changes to Page B would impact a much greater volume of customers, it should take priority over Page A.

But on a website with tens of thousands of pages, how do you identify the biggest struggle areas and opportunities? This is where Bounce Rate: Weighted comes in useful. As well as looking at the bounce rate of a page, it also takes into consideration the proportion of total site traffic that page accounts for, meaning that as in the example above, pages with lower bounce rate but much higher traffic will be ranked above high bounce but low traffic pages. The calculation is;

Bounce Rate: Weighted = [Single Page Visits / Visits] x [Visits / Total Visits]

If total visits was equal to 10,000, then in the example above Page A would have

[4/5] x [5/10,000] = 0.4% Bounce Rate: Weighted

While Page B would have

[1,500/3,000] x [3,000/10,000] = 15% Bounce Rate: Weighted

Therefore in a ranked report Page B would rank above Page A, and the most important pages to focus on would be at the top of the list.

What’s the difference between a bounce and a single access?

A single access is a visit where only one unique page was viewed. It differs from a bounce in that a user can interact with the page, for example clicking through a carousel of images or clicking play on a video. Reloading the page will also count as a single access as there will only be one unique page name value captured.

The technical definition is that a bounce is a visit with a single Hit whereas a single access is a visit with a single unique Page Name value.