Can I change the bounce rate setting in Matomo?

The bounce rate in Matomo cannot be manually adjusted.

A bounce is when a visitor to your website views one page and triggers no other tracked interaction (such as an event, download, or goal conversion) before leaving the site. If visitors do not navigate to another page or trigger an interaction, the visit is considered a bounce and Matomo records the time spent on that visit as 0 seconds. Whether the visitor stays for 5 seconds or 5 minutes does not affect whether it is counted as a bounce.

If you need to measure visit duration on single page views, refer to the approach covered below in Tracking time-based engagement.

Tracking Bounces and Bounce rate

The Bounce rate and number of Bounces only increment when visitors start and end the visit on the same page without doing anything else in between.

• Bounce rate refers to the percentage of visits that only had a single page view.
• Bounces refer to the number of visits that only had a single page view.

This report example shows how well the entry page retains or engages visitors with a low bounce rate (6%) suggests that most visitors take further action after landing on this page. Learn more on how to improve your bounce rate.

You can further analyse the visitors’ continued journey through your site in Matomo > Behaviour > Transitions or Users Flow reports.

Tracking time-based engagement

If you want to distinguish between visitors who leave a page quickly and those who stay for a while:

• Use a heartbeat timer to send ping events while the visitor remains on the page. This enables Matomo to measure time spent, even for single page views. See How to add a JavaScript heartbeat timer.
• Use Segments to filter visits based on visit duration and bounce status. For example, if your heartbeat timer sends an interaction event after 180 seconds, you can create a segment for users who bounced but stayed long enough to trigger the event.

The bounce rate in Matomo reflects standard web analytics definitions and cannot be configured manually. However, you can influence how bounces are recorded by tracking meaningful interactions or time-based engagement.