Soft vs Hard Bounces: A Closer Look at Bounce Rate

Analytics · By On · 13 Comments

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).

All Visits w Single Page Visits

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.

  • http://www.investors.com MG

    Hi,

    I am try­ing to recre­ate these seg­ments within Dis­cover but seem to be encoun­ter­ing an error. I’ve tried to save both seg­ments and both times, I receive a Seg­ment Error mes­sage telling me there are incom­pat­i­bly ele­ments in the seg­ment (incom­pat­i­ble ele­ment being Vis­its). Any insights on how I can resolve this issue?

    Thanks,
    Marc

    • http://blogs.omniture.com/author/kwilleitner Kevin Willeit­ner

      Sounds like you are try­ing to save the seg­ment in the Site­Cat­a­lyst folder. Seg­ments saved in the Site­Cat­a­lyst folder need to be com­pat­i­ble with seg­ments that you can cre­ate in Data Ware­house. Because this seg­ment uses some incom­pat­i­ble ele­ments you will need to save to a dif­fer­ent folder. If you do not have any other fold­ers set up you can cre­ate a new one by click­ing on the folder icon in the bot­tom right cor­ner of the Seg­ments Pane. Then press New but­ton to cre­ate a new folder. Once your folder is cre­ated you can save your seg­ments to it.

  • Cheryl Fuerte

    Great post about soft and hard bounces– valu­able insights too.

  • http://www.tomsanalytics.com Tom Miller

    This is really what web ana­lyt­ics is all about. You’ve taken per­haps the most mis-used site met­ric (bounce rate) and, with a mod­est inclu­sion of addi­tional data, com­pletely refuted the most obvi­ous spec­u­la­tive con­clu­sion that would arise from the orig­i­nal dataset. Great illustration!

  • Inte­grati Mar­ket­ing Consulting

    Great post, excel­lent details and I feel I have learnt more about Hard and Soft Bounces, thank you!
    :)

  • Paul

    Kevin -

    Thanks for the post. I was able to repli­cate the steps you put forth with my data using a three month time frame. The one ques­tion that I have is regard­ing the Rev­enue Per Vis­i­tor met­ric. When I changed the gran­u­lar­ity from Day to Week to Month, the RPV increased 2x to 3x with each change. I think that this has some­thing to due to Vis­i­tor count in the equa­tion, so I am won­der­ing on how Dis­cover cal­cu­lates the Unique Vis­i­tor based gran­u­lar­ity of the report. Any insight that you could pro­vide would be most appreciative.

    Thanks
    Paul

  • http://blogs.omniture.com/author/lmactaggart Laura Mac­Tag­gart

    @ Marc
    The rea­son why you are unable to save the seg­ments is because you are try­ing to save them to the Site­Cat­a­lyst folder. If you select another folder from the drop down in the Save win­dow, like Favorites, you should have no prob­lem sav­ing the segments.

  • http://www.finn.no Bente Løn­nquist Busch

    Great and inter­est­ing post! I have never looked at bounce from this point of view before.
    I think it is the most use­ful if you want to look at your traf­fic from a vis­i­tor point of view, and you’re mak­ing a great point when you say that your biggest fans might have your web­site as home, and there­fore will bounce from time to tome. How­ever, if you look at met­rics that use ses­sions (con­ver­sions per ses­sion, etc), I’d say that bounce is bounce, and I’d still be inter­ested in how I could tempt all my users into look­ing at more stuff on my site once they arrive — and per­haps per­suade them into buying.

  • http://www.fuelinteractive.com Melissa Kavanagh

    This is such a great post. Of course, it leaves me with more Discover-envy than I had before…Is there no way to do some­thing like this in SiteCatalyst/DataWarehouse?

  • Andrea Moro

    Inter­est­ing arti­cle, but how do you aggre­gate mul­ti­ple visit from the dif­fer­ent sessions?

  • http://analyticsarch.com/wordpress/ ateeq ahmad

    I have pon­der­ing this exact prob­lem for a while now and I think the con­cept of a soft bounce and a quan­tifi­ca­tion of this through Dis­cover is ideal because it saves me from query­ing my DWH for days on end..

    Thanks very much Kevin!

  • http://www.realizeinc.com/ Rapid Pro­to­typ­ing

    Really inter­est­ing con­cept about the bounces and really was impressed by what I read about the “soft and hard bounces” – never really thought of it in the light of what is writ­ten here – makes sense!! It really gives you a com­pletely dif­fer­ent pic­ture of the peo­ple who visit your site and am cer­tainly plan­ning to use Dis­cover to check out the traf­fic in my site!! The illus­tra­tions were great and will get back with my feed­back shortly!!

  • http://biggest-loser.se Ste­fan Nilsson

    Just like Melissa, I’m won­der­ing if there’s some­thing like this in SiteCatalyst/DataWarehouse?