Our best-converting page had the highest bounce rate, and that was correct.

We ranked pages by bounce rate and found an anomaly. A page with a 71% bounce rate was also our highest-converting page at 22.4% to signup.

We assumed bounce rate was bad. It was not. That page answered a single question completely. People who came for that question got their answer and left satisfied. People who wanted more clicked through and signed up. The high bounce was a sign of a page doing one job well, not a page failing.

We had been treating all bounces as failures across the site. When we segmented by intent — did the page answer a question or sell a product — the pattern changed. Informational pages had high bounce and high satisfaction. Sales pages had low bounce and high conversion. We had been applying one benchmark to two different jobs.

We stopped reporting a single site-wide bounce rate and started reporting it per page intent. Content decisions got clearer immediately.

What metric are you applying uniformly across pages that are doing fundamentally different jobs?