The GA4 Metric That Wasted My Team's Time (And What We Used Instead)

The Ghost of "Bounce Rate"

For a decade, "Bounce Rate" was the safety blanket of digital marketers. If it was low, we were happy. If it was high, we panicked.

When GA4 launched, Bounce Rate initially disappeared. Then, after user outcry, Google brought it back. But it wasn't the same metric.

I wasted weeks trying to "fix" a client's Bounce Rate that looked wildly different between Universal Analytics (UA) and GA4.

The Misinterpretation

In UA, a "Bounce" was a single-page session with 0 interaction hits. If a user came to your blog, read 5,000 words for 10 minutes, and left, that was a 100% Bounce. A failure.

In GA4, a "Bounce" is just the inverse of an Engaged Session. An Engaged Session is a session that lasts >10 seconds, OR has >1 pageview, OR has a conversion.

So that same user reading for 10 minutes? In GA4, that is NOT a Bounce.

The Crisis:
I had a client with a blog-heavy site. In UA, their Bounce Rate was 85%. In GA4, it dropped to 30%.

The marketing team celebrated. "We fixed the content!" they shouted.

No, we didn't. We just changed the ruler we were measuring with.

I spent hours in meetings trying to explain that user behavior hadn't changed, only the definition had. They didn't want to hear it. It wasted massive amounts of time reconciling reports because the "Year-Over-Year" comparison was mathematically impossible.

The Metric That Replaced It: Engagement Rate

I finally convinced the team to banish Bounce Rate from our vocabulary. We replaced it with Engagement Rate.

Why? Because it's positive psychology. "Bounce Rate" measures failure (who left?). "Engagement Rate" measures success (who stayed?).

But even Engagement Rate has a flaw: The 10-second threshold.

Is a 11-second visit really "Engaged"? For a TikTok generation, maybe. For a B2B SaaS platform selling $50k software, absolutely not.

How Sheets Saved Me (Again)

I realized the default "Engagement Rate" was too soft for my client. So, I went back to my trusty GA4-to-Sheets pipeline.

I created a "High-Intent Engagement Rate" metric.

• I pulled raw sessions.
• I filtered for sessions with (Time on Page > 60 seconds) OR (Scroll Depth > 50%).
• I calculated my own rate.

This custom metric showed the truth: Only 15% of users were truly reading the content, despite GA4 reporting a 70% "Engagement Rate."

This insight led to a complete rewrite of the blog intros, which eventually doubled our true read time.

The Lesson

Never accept a platform's default metric definition without reading the documentation. "Users," "Sessions," and "Conversions" are not universal truths; they are vendor-specific calculations.

If a metric looks too good to be true (like that 30% Bounce Rate), dig deeper. It probably is layout.