Why The Return of Bounce Rate in Google Analytics 4 Is Good For Marketing

Some metrics still have value despite changes in a marketing dashboard and analytics offerings

Google Analytics has seen a lot of changes in 2022. The latest is to bring back a metric, bounce rate, to its reporting.

You have to love a movie where a character makes a triumphant return. If analytics were a movie, that character is the bounce rate metric. Bounce rate is a diagnostic metric that is used by analytics practitioners to make decisions on poor performing website pages. Changes in Google Analytics placed a spot on the metric and its value in digital marketing planning.

An interesting development among analytic practitioners is the return of the bounce rate metric. Worries among analytics practitioners rose up when Google removed the metric from the first version of the GA update, named GA4.

But the move proved to be temporary, as Google decided to bring back the metric in the latest version of GA4. Google added a few changes to reflect the evolution of measurement. (I reported the impact of its elimination from GA reports in this CMSWire post). The bounce rate metric is now available in Explorations and Reporting Customization in Google Analytics 4.

What is a Bounce Rate?

Bounce rates are a diagnostic metric. They represent the percentage in which a…