How to Find Bounce Rate in Google Analytics 4

If you've recently made the switch from Universal Analytics to Google Analytics 4, you might be scratching your head trying to find a familiar metric: bounce rate. The short answer is that Google replaced it with something better. This guide explains what happened to bounce rate, how its new replacement works, and most importantly, how to get it back into your GA4 reports.

What Happened to Bounce Rate in GA4? From 'Bounce' to 'Engagement'

In the old world of Universal Analytics (UA), a "bounce" was defined as a single-page session. If someone landed on your blog post, read the entire article for ten minutes, found exactly what they were looking for, and then left without clicking to another page, UA counted that as a bounce. This was a simplistic metric that often mislabeled valuable user interactions as failures.

The modern web is much different. With single-page applications, infinite scroll, on-page video plays, and long-form content, the idea that a user must visit a second page to be "valuable" is outdated and inaccurate.

Recognizing this, Google Analytics 4 retired the traditional bounce rate and introduced two more intelligent metrics:

Engaged sessions: A session where a user was actively engaged with your site.
Engagement rate: The percentage of all sessions that were "engaged."

Instead of measuring a negative action (leaving), GA4 focuses on a positive one (engaging). This shift provides a much more accurate picture of how users are interacting with your content.

Understanding Engagement Rate: The Smarter Metric

Before you learn where to find the 'new' bounce rate, it's important to understand what GA4's default 'engagement rate' metric is measuring. Think of it as the opposite of bounce rate - it highlights the good sessions, not the bad ones.

GA4 defines an engaged session as any session that meets at least one of the following criteria:

It lasts longer than 10 seconds.
It includes a conversion event.
It involves at least two pageviews or screenviews.

Your engagement rate is simply the percentage of total sessions that meet one of those conditions. For example, if you had 1,000 sessions yesterday and 750 of them were engaged sessions, your engagement rate would be 75%.

This is a significant improvement because it properly values different kinds of user interest. That visitor who spent ten minutes reading your in-depth guide is no longer considered a "bounce." In GA4, they are correctly identified as an engaged user.

So, How Does GA4 Define Bounce Rate Now?

After a lot of feedback from marketers who missed the familiar term, Google eventually added bounce rate back into GA4. However, it's not the same as it was in Universal Analytics.

In GA4, bounce rate is simply the inverse of engagement rate. That's it.

If your engagement rate is 75%, your bounce rate is 25%. It represents the percentage of sessions that were not engaged - meaning they didn't last longer than 10 seconds, trigger a conversion, or view more than one page.

While engagement rate is the more insightful metric to focus on, knowing how to find the bounce rate can be useful for benchmarking or reporting to stakeholders who are familiar with the term.

Step-by-Step: How to See Bounce Rate and Engagement Rate in GA4

Engagement rate appears by default in many standard GA4 reports. Bounce rate, however, does not. Here's a step-by-step guide to finding engagement rate and adding bounce rate to your most-used reports.

Finding Engagement Rate (It’s Already There!)

You can find engagement rate in most standard user, traffic, and pages reports. A common place to look is the Traffic acquisition report.

From your GA4 dashboard, navigate to Reports in the left-hand navigation menu.
Under the Life cycle section, click on Acquisition, then select Traffic acquisition.
Scroll the table to the right. You will see columns for Sessions, Engaged sessions, and Engagement rate right there by default.

You'll find these metrics in other key reports as well, such as Engagement > Pages and screens, which shows you the engagement rate for each individual page on your website. This is a great place to identify which content is capturing user attention and which might need improvement.

Adding Bounce Rate to Your GA4 Reports

Since bounce rate doesn't show up automatically, you’ll need to customize your reports to include it. It’s a simple, one-time setup. Once you save the changes, bounce rate will appear in that report going forward.

Let's use the Pages and screens report as an example for this walkthrough.

Navigate to the report you want to customize. For this example, go to Reports > Engagement > Pages and screens.
In the top right corner of the report, you'll see a pencil icon. Click it to Customize report.
A customization panel will slide out from the right. Under the Report data section, click on Metrics.
At the bottom of the list of current metrics, click + Add metric.
A search bar will appear. Type "Bounce rate" and select it from the list.
Click the blue Apply button in the bottom right corner.
You'll now see Bounce Rate added to your metrics list. You can drag and drop it anywhere you like. A good spot is right after Engagement rate.
Finally, click the blue Save button in the top right, and then select Save changes to current report. Confirm the save.

Now, when you view the Pages and screens report, you will see a 'Bounce Rate' column right where you placed it, giving you both the old-school metric and GA4's more informative 'Engagement rate' side-by-side.

You can follow this exact process to add bounce rate to other standard reports like Traffic acquisition, Landing pages, and more.

Taking it a Step Further: Adjusting the Engagement Timer

One of the quiet superpowers of GA4’s engagement metrics is that you can customize what counts as "time." The default 10-second threshold for an engaged session might be too low for a site with long, technical articles or too high for a simple landing page.

You can adjust this timer to better match your site’s user experience.

Navigate to Admin (the gear icon in the bottom-left).
In the Property column, click on Data Streams and select your website's data stream.
Under Google tag, click on Configure tag settings.
In the Settings panel, click Show more.
Click on Adjust session timeout.
The second option here is Adjust timer for engaged sessions. You can change this from the default of 10 seconds up to 60 seconds.
Click Save once you've set your desired time.

Customizing this setting ensures that your engagement metrics more accurately reflect what "real" engagement looks like for your specific audience and content.

Final Thoughts

At first glance, GA4's move away from the traditional bounce rate can feel confusing. But swapping it for the smarter, more nuanced 'engagement rate' metric gives you a much clearer understanding of user behavior. Now you know that 'bounce rate' is really just the flip side of 'engagement rate', and you have a process for easily adding it back into your reports.

Having all of your data in one place is the first step, but customizing dozens of reports across Google Analytics, your ad platforms, and your CRM can be a massive time sink. With Graphed, we automate the hard parts. Instead of digging through menus, you can just connect your sources and ask, "Create a dashboard showing my top 10 landing pages by engagement rate and bounce rate from last month." We'll build a live, updating dashboard for you in seconds, freeing you up to focus on strategy instead of report-building.