What is Bounce Rate?

Bounce rate is an engagement measure and is virtually the same for both Matomo and Google Analytics. Both however deal with different event variables on-page.

Bounce rate= (Bounces / Sessions)*100

To know what this means you need to know what bounces and sessions are:

• Session = A visit to your website. The session is called a session when the user leaves the website and does not return in 30 minutes. All sessions start at zero on 0:00 every day.
• Bounce = A visit to your website, without triggering another event*

* Evens could be a scroll event, new page view, reload, click event etc. 

The extra variables that can influence bounce rate could cause different readings per page, which makes it hard to compare on your website, as with other websites. To have a single bounce rate percentage, we opted for a single, static event that occurs on every page to measure engagement: Time on Page.

How Burst Statistics calculates Bounce Rate

A high bounce rate is not bad, per se. If someone finds the information on your contact page, and contacts you immediately, a high bounce rate is obvious. But if you have a scroll event, and your bounce rate is low all things equal. You might be triggered to change the page, although the performance didn’t change.

To never second guess the bounce rate per page, we add a cut off of 10 seconds for every counted bounce. If someone stays longer than 5 seconds on any page, a session is triggered. So our formula is:

Bounce rate= (Bounces / Sessions)*100

To know what this means you need to know what bounces and sessions are:

• Session = A visit to your website. The session is called a session when the user leaves the website and does not return in 30 minutes. All sessions start at zero at 0:00 every day.
• Bounce = A visit to your website, without triggering another event in 5 seconds*

The reason is a pageview of 30 seconds without a scroll event can be a session if the article contains a recipe for example.

Configure your own Bounce Rate

You can change the Burst addition of seconds with a filter if you want to configure your own Bounce Rate: