Bounce rate, sessions, and time on site: what the numbers actually mean
The exact definitions Embaze's dashboard uses under the hood, so a 31% bounce rate means what you think it means.
Every analytics tool defines "session" and "bounce rate" slightly differently, and the difference changes what the number on your dashboard actually tells you. Here's exactly what Embaze counts.
A session is one tab, until it closes
A session starts when the tracking script first runs in a tab and ends when that tab closes — there's no 30-minute idle timeout like some tools use. Every pageview recorded with the same session ID before that tab closes counts as one session.
Bounce rate is single-pageview sessions
Bounce rate is the percentage of sessions that recorded exactly one pageview. If a visitor opens your pricing page, reads it, and closes the tab without clicking anything else, that's a bounce — even if they read every word and it did exactly what you wanted. Bounce rate measures navigation depth, not engagement quality. A high bounce rate on a single-page docs article or a blog post is often completely normal, not a problem to fix.
Average time on site undercounts, on purpose
Time on site is measured as the gap between a session's first and last recorded pageview. That means two real limitations worth knowing: a single-pageview session always contributes exactly 0 seconds (there's no second pageview to measure a gap to), and the very last page someone looks at in any session contributes no time at all, because there's no pageview after it to measure against. This is standard for any tool that tracks via pageviews rather than a running heartbeat — the number is a real floor on engagement time, not an exact measurement of it.
None of this makes the numbers wrong — it makes them precise about what they're measuring. Knowing the exact definition is what lets you read "31% bounce rate, 2m 14s avg. time" and actually trust what it's telling you about your traffic.