Retention, bounce, and exit rates - Kameleoon Documentation

If you use Kameleoon alongside Google Analytics 4, you may notice that their retention and bounce rate numbers don’t match. This happens because the two platforms define these metrics differently: Kameleoon measures whether a visitor clicked on their landing page, while GA4 measures session engagement across a broader set of criteria. Understanding this difference is important before you interpret experiment results or compare data across tools. This article explains how each platform calculates retention and bounce rates, what those numbers mean in practice, and how to track bounce rate in Kameleoon. It also covers the exit rate, which exists in GA4 but has no equivalent in Kameleoon.

Retention rate

In Kameleoon, the retention rate measures how many visitors and visits make a click on the first page they land on. It is the opposite of the bounce rate. Kameleoon provides this as a pre-created goal, so you only need to attach it to an experiment to start tracking conversions. Use this goal only for experiments running on landing pages. Otherwise, the goal may trigger before the visitor is targeted, which prevents the test from recording the conversion. Tests only record post-targeting conversions. 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). GA4 defines the engagement rate 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, GA4 considers the session engaged. The engagement rate 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 and visits leave the site without making any click on the page. This metric is the opposite of the retention rate. You can add the code below to the Kameleoon Global Script to track conversions when visitors bounce (when they leave the page without clicking). This script runs on all pages, meaning the script records a bounce on the last page the visitor viewed. 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. GA4 defines the bounce rate 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, GA4 does not consider the session a bounce. The bounce rate is useful for analytics, providing insights into engagement across any page of the entire site. GA4 example:

GA4 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 the 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 bounce rate.

Exit rate

In GA4, for a given page, the exit rate is the ratio of sessions where that page was the last page viewed to the total number of sessions that included that 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 (sessions 1 and 3) out of 3 sessions that included that page (sessions 1, 3, and 4). See more info in GA4 documentation. Kameleoon cannot record the exit rate, because its data structure is based on visits and visitors rather than page views.

​Retention rate

​Bounce rate

​Exit rate

Retention rate

Bounce rate

Exit rate