Vercel Analytics bounce rate: where to find it

Where it is: the project’s Analytics page

Vercel Web Analytics does have a bounce rate, and it lives in the dashboard: open a project, then Analytics in the sidebar. Vercel’s Web Analytics documentation defines it as “the percentage of visitors who land on a page and leave without taking any further action”, and gives the formula:

Bounce Rate (%) = (Single-Page Sessions / Total Sessions) × 100

Two details from the same page are worth knowing:

• A session is a group of page views by the same visitor.
• Custom events don’t count toward the bounce rate, so if you filter the dashboard by a custom event, the bounce rate always reads 0%.

Visitors aren’t tracked with cookies: Vercel identifies them by a hash of the request that resets every day. So a “session” here can’t follow someone across days.

Where it isn’t: the API and the CLI

If you want bounce rate outside the dashboard, for a report or for many projects at once, the official routes don’t have it:

• The Web Analytics API returns pageviews and visitors for visits, and count and visitors for custom events (Vercel’s API guide). The aggregate endpoint can group by time, page, route, country, referrer, device, browser, OS and UTM fields, but not by session, so you can’t rebuild single-page sessions from it either.
• The Vercel CLI’s vercel metrics command doesn’t offer it. Its documentation says so directly: bounce rate isn’t available through vercel metrics; use the Web Analytics dashboard to view it.

So a tool built on Vercel’s public API, Lookout included, can’t show Vercel’s bounce rate. For that number, the project’s Analytics page is the place.

What to use across projects: pages per visit

Lookout shows pages per visit instead: page views divided by visitors for the period, from the same two numbers the API does return. It answers a similar question. A site where most people read one page and leave sits close to 1.0; a site where people click around sits higher. Because it’s computed the same way for every project, you can rank dozens of sites by it, which is hard to do with bounce rates spread across separate dashboards.

Read it with its limits in mind:

• It’s page views per visitor over the whole period, not a share of sessions, so it measures something related but different.
• It’s an average, so a few very engaged readers can lift it while most still leave after one page.
• It won’t match the bounce rate in Vercel’s dashboard, and it isn’t meant to. Compare like with like.

A practical routine

1. Scan pages per visit across all your projects, alongside visitors and the change on the previous period, to spot the sites whose engagement moved.
2. Open those sites in Vercel’s Analytics tab for the bounce rate and the per-page detail.
3. Check the pages people land on, and the referrers that bring them, before changing anything.

Step one is what Lookout is for: see Vercel Analytics for multiple projects at once, or open the live demo, where the table sorts 12 sample projects by pages per visit. For more on how Lookout and Vercel’s dashboard divide the work, see Lookout vs. Vercel’s built-in Web Analytics.