Bounce rate is one of the most misread metrics in affiliate analytics.

Bounce rate is one of the most misread metrics in affiliate analytics.

A 90% bounce rate on a comparison article isn't necessarily a problem — if users are landing, reading for 3 minutes, clicking your affiliate link, and converting on the merchant site. That's a successful single-page session.

The issue is that Google Analytics (and most platforms) define "bounce" as any session with a single page interaction. A reader who consumes your entire 2,500-word review and clicks through counts the same as someone who landed and immediately closed the tab.

Fix this with engaged session thresholds. Set a minimum time-on-page event (say, 30 seconds) that fires if a user stays past that point. Now you can split your traffic into truly bounced vs. engaged-and-exited.

For content affiliates especially, engagement rate is a far more honest signal than raw bounce rate. GA4 defaults to reporting engaged sessions — one of the few improvements worth noting in the transition from UA.

Stop optimizing against a metric that doesn't distinguish between a reader and a mistaken click.