App traffic in general is very hard to track in Google Analytics. When someone sees the mobile ad inside an app (and most mobile inventory is in apps) and then clicks to the client’s website the app does not pass the tracking code to Google Analytics so Google Analytics categorizes it as a bounce because it can’t track that person who comes from an app. It’s a limitation of Google Analytics. Often we see 100% bounce rate, or 0% time spent on site, because the data isn’t being referred properly through a Google Analytics code. The apps goal is to keep them in the app while loading website data within its frame.
Please click here to download an explanation from one of our mobile exchanges: http://support.vicimediainc.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Mobile-Exchange-One-Sheet-On-High-Bounce-Rates-Google-Analytics-Discrepancies.pdf
An app is not a web site, it is not viewed in a web browser and they do not contain header information when linking out to a web site so Google Analytics sees there is no referrer in the headers. So when Google Analytics is seeing the user visiting your web site, it is seeing that there is no referral and it will deem the traffic to have no source and therefore assign that referral as Direct traffic and as an immediate “bounce”.
For more information on this: https://moz.com/blog/guide-to-direct-traffic-google-analytics and https://www.emarketer.com/content/why-is-mobile-app-ad-viewability-so-hard-to-measure
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