Bounce Rate Discrepancy

Question

We are unsure of which Bounce Rate metric to use for our overall site performance reporting, one thing I noticed, for both of the screenshots where the bounce rate looks more accurate (49%) the metric being used is ‘Bounce Rate (Page Views)’ rather than ‘Bounce Rate’.

I am new to my digital growth team and my predecessor had mentioned a Bounce Rate discrepancy before she left. With some of our brands, the team members have their own dashboards recording Bounce Rate that don't seem to be accurate.

I found this in my initial research:

Bounce Rate (Page Views)	Not a standard Adobe metric—often refers to bounces divided by page views.	Can be misleading; not recommended for precise analysis.
Bounce Rate (SPV/V)	Single Page Visits ÷ Visits	Measures how many visits involved only one page view. Useful for site-wide analysis.
Bounce Rate (SPV/E)	Single Page Visits ÷ Entries	Focuses on how often a landing page leads to a bounce. Best for entry page analysis.
Bounce Rate (Adobe default)	Bounces ÷ Entries (where bounce = visit with exactly one hit)	Most accurate for identifying true bounces—no additional hits at all.

Could someone assist in which metric we should use and how to determine its accuracy?

MandyGeorge · Answer

So all four of these metrics that you mentioned are going to give you different results. I'm not too familiar with the "Bounce Rate (Page Views)" - is that a custom metric that someone at your organization made?

Adobe's official bounce rate is the bounces divided by entries. A bounce is defined as a visit with a single hit. For this reason a lot people opt to use single page visits instead of actual bounces. If someone lands on your page and a page view call fires, and then there's a pop-up to accept cookies or see a flyer or coupon, etc., and the pop-up fires an impression. That second call would mean that the visit is no longer a bounce. A single page visit can have multiple hits, but as long as only one page is seen, then it counts as a single page visit.

If you're looking at individual dimension items a single page visit divided by entries is going to give you the percent of single page visits out of all the times that value was the first one seen in the visit. If you use visits instead of entries, it will count all the visits where it was seen, regardless of if it was the first value in the visit or not.

My recommendation is to talk to others at your organization and see what they use. Each of these metrics measures bounce rate a slightly different way. Some will argue that one is better than the other, but the important thing is consistency. If others at your organization are using a combination of the different bounce rates, it's worth having a talk about which one you want to use as your standard definition, and then make sure that everyone uses the same one.

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