Soft vs Hard Bounces: A Closer Look at Bounce Rate

What if I told you that your bounced vis­i­tors include some of your best cus­tomers and one of the most prof­itable seg­ments for your site? Sound crazy? Read on…

Bounce rate is one of the most loved met­rics. Bounce rate is an indi­ca­tor of page per­for­mance and tells you if your page was com­pelling enough to entice entries on this page to click-through to an addi­tional page of your site or if they decided to leave your site all together. It is cal­cu­lated as sin­gle page vis­its divided by entries (sin­gle page vis­its is also called sin­gle access vis­its in SiteCatalyst).

Omni­ture Dis­cover allows us to take a deeper look at bounce rate by dif­fer­en­ti­at­ing between a hard bounce and a soft bounce. By a hard bounce I mean that they came to your site, saw one page, left, and never came back. By a soft bounce I mean that they had a single-page visit once but they did come back some other time.

You can imag­ine that some­one com­ing to your site and imme­di­ately leav­ing is a bad thing but how many of those bounces are because a big fan of your site has book­marked your site to load every time they start up their browser? This per­son may visit your site reg­u­larly and buy lots of stuff but may also often load his browser (and your page with it) and then nav­i­gate else­where. This illus­trates one case of how some­one bounc­ing from your site doesn’t mean they hate you. This kind of analy­sis is great for all sites but espe­cially for sites like woot​.com, steepand​cheap​.com, blogs in gen­eral, or any other site that is mostly just one page. If your site just has one page than you are pretty much guar­an­teed to have a high bounce rate so it is worth tak­ing a closer look.

Here is how you can look at these soft and hard bounces in Dis­cover. Below are the total vis­its and sin­gle page vis­its for a site over the past few weeks (see this Dis­cover tip for trend­ing sin­gle page vis­its). At the site level, vis­its are the same as entries so we can use vis­its to cal­cu­late the bounce rate (41MM/83MM) which is 50% for this site (ouch).

To take a closer look and see what amount of these sin­gle page vis­its are a hard bounce we can use the fol­low­ing segment:

This seg­ment is look­ing for vis­i­tors to the site that have only one visit and a path length of 1 (aka, a sin­gle page visit). Sim­ply put, this is a vis­i­tor whose only inter­ac­tion for the time period was a sin­gle page view. When we add this seg­ment to the report we can then see how many of these sin­gle page vis­its are the “for­ever lost” kind.

Notice that 53% of all sin­gle page vis­its are a hard bounce (22MM/41MM). That’s only half of them! You can either sub­tract hard bounces from all sin­gle page vis­its to get the soft bounces or you can apply the fol­low­ing segment:

This seg­ment is look­ing for vis­i­tors with mul­ti­ple vis­its where at least one of those vis­its was a sin­gle page visit. These will be our soft bounces. And here are the results.

47% of Sin­gle Page Vis­its are from our Soft Bounce seg­ment. These are sin­gle page vis­its that inter­act with your site out­side of the sin­gle page vis­its counted here. Keep in mind that this in not in chrono­log­i­cal order and so they may have had a bounce visit before or after another visit.

Now it gets really inter­est­ing when we look at rev­enue per vis­i­tor by seg­ment to under­stand how much money I’m mak­ing off of these peo­ple. You can see that of these three seg­ments below, my soft bounce group has sub­stan­tially higher rev­enue per vis­i­tor than both of the other seg­ments. The other seg­ments here are “All Vis­its” which is a sim­ple site aver­age and “Ex Hard Bounces” which is all vis­its minus the hard bounces (just to make it a lit­tle more fair when com­par­ing to the soft bounce group). Com­pared to the site aver­age, the soft bounce vis­i­tors are three times more pop­u­lar (and yes, this is real data.) Appar­ently, even though the soft bounce group does have a sin­gle page visit on their record, they cer­tainly make up for it dur­ing other vis­its. (Notice that by week the num­bers are lower…this is caused by a dedu­pli­cated vis­i­tor count used as the denom­i­na­tor. Stay tuned for a future post on work­ing with vis­i­tors in Discover.)

So there you go…soft and hard bounces. Hope­fully this gives you pause if you are try­ing to be tricky and pro­vide dis­counts to peo­ple that are imme­di­ately leav­ing your site. These peo­ple may have already pur­chased or are likely to return with­out you hav­ing to give away money to do it. Look at the data for your site to see if this is the case.