What Is Bounce Rate and Should We Worry About It?

I built an app, and if you have done you may also have come across "bounce rate." Here's what it actually means, and how I'm planning to think about it once my app starts getting visitors.

Bounce rate is the percentage of people who show up on our site or app, and then leave without doing anything else. No clicking around, no scrolling, nothing. Just in and out.

When you hear "high bounce rate," it sounds like something went wrong. But that's not always true. It really depends on what you're expecting people to do on that page.

For something like a blog post, someone can read the whole thing, get their answer, and leave. That's technically a bounce, but it's not necessarily a bad thing. For something like an app with a quiz or a tool, a high bounce rate usually does mean people aren't engaging the way you hoped.

My app had a simple flow; someone takes a quiz, then gives their email to see their results. Once I get real visitors, bounce rate will tell me if people are dropping off right at the start, before even trying the quiz. If that happens, it's a sign the first thing they see isn't pulling them in.

Right now, with barely any traffic, checking bounce rate wouldn't tell me much. It only becomes useful once there's enough visitors to actually see a pattern. So for now, I'm focused on building the app well, and I'll pay closer attention to this number once real traffic starts coming in.

Bounce rate isn't something to panic over. It's just one more signal to help understand what's working and what's not, once there's enough data to look at.

Have you checked your bounce rate yet? What did you find?