Tracking user interactions on a page is crucial for measuring engagement and conversions. However, not all visitors stay long enough to engage meaningfully—some leave almost immediately, while others browse briefly without interacting. These behaviors impact key metrics like retention, bounce, and exit rates, making it essential to understand how users navigate your site and where potential drop-offs occur.
In the article below, you’ll learn about retention (referred to as engagement in GA4) and bounce rates in Kameleoon compared to GA4, as well as the exit rate, which exists only in GA4.
Retention rate
In Kameleoon, the retention rate measures how many visitors/visits make a click on the first page they land on. It is the opposite of the bounce rate. Kameleoon provides this goal as a pre-created goal, so you only need to attach it to an experiment to start tracking conversions.
This goal should only be used for experiments running on landing pages. Otherwise, it may trigger before the visitor is targeted, preventing the conversion from being recorded in the test, as only post-targeting conversions are recorded in a test.
Kameleoon example:
The page’s retention rate above is higher for the variations compared to the original version. In the screenshot above, approximately 55% of visits included at least one click on their landing page, which is also the targeted page (the click occurred after the targeting).
In GA4, the engagement rate is defined as the percentage of sessions that lasted more than 10 seconds, had conversion events, or included more than one page view. It measures engagement at the session level, meaning that if a user interacts with a second page or triggers an event, the session is considered as engaged. This is useful for analytics, providing insights into engagement across any page of the entire site.
GA4 example:
The site’s engagement rate above is the percentage of engaged sessions compared to the total sessions. In the above screenshot, email led to 1,356 engaged sessions out of 1,630 total, equating to an engagement rate of 83.19%.
See the GA4 documentation for more information on how to improve the retention rate.
Bounce rate
The bounce rate measures how many visitors/visits leave the site without making any click on the page. This metric is the opposite of the bounce rate.
You can add the code below to the Kameleoon Global Script to track conversions when visitors bounce (i.e., leave the page without clicking). This script runs on all pages, meaning a bounce will be recorded on the last page viewed by the visitor. To track the bounce rate for a specific page, simply wrap the code in an if statement that checks the page URL.
// set the right GOAL_ID below
if(document.location.href.includes('cart')) {
Kameleoon.API.Goals.processConversion(GOAL_ID)
const handleBounceConversion = () => {
Kameleoon.API.Goals.cancelConversion(GOAL_ID)
document.removeEventListener('click', handleBounceConversion)
}
Kameleoon.API.Utils.addEventListener(document, 'click', handleBounceConversion)
}
Kameleoon example:
The page’s bounce rate above is lower for the variations compared to the original version (which is set as the winning variation since it has a higher conversion rate). In the screenshot, about 45% of visits did not make any clicks on their landing page. Note that, in this example, the code only tracks the bounce goal on the landing page.
In GA4, the bounce rate is defined as the percentage of sessions that lasted less than 10 seconds, had no conversion events, or included only one page view. It measures bounce at the session level, meaning that if a user interacts with a second page or triggers an event, the session is not considered a bounce. This is useful for analytics, providing insights into engagement across any page of the entire site.
GA4 example:
GA 4 doesn’t have a standard bounce rate report. You’ll need to customize individual reports in order to see it.
Bounce rate is the percentage of sessions that aren’t engaged. In case above, that would be 16.81% (because you can subtract the 83.19% of engaged sessions from 100%).
See the GA4 documentation for more information on how to improve the retention rate.
Exit rate
In GA4, for a given page, the exit rate is the ratio of sessions where this page was the last viewed to the total number of sessions that included this page.
GA4 example:
- Session 1: page A → page B → page C
- Session 2: page A
- Session 3: page A → page C
- Session 4: page B → page C → page A → page B
The exit rate for page C is 66%, as it was the last page viewed in 2 sessions (session 1 and 3) out of 3 sessions that included that page (sessions 1., 3 and 4).
See more info in GA4 documentation.
This event can only be recorded in GA4, not in Kameleoon, as Kameleoon’s data structure is based on visits and visitors rather than page views.
