Bounce is a metric that is commonly used in email marketing but also found in web analytics tools such as google analytics. Bounce is when a user visits a single landing page and after viewing only that page, exits the entire website. Oftentimes marketers focus on tracking the bounce rate, which is the percentage rate of users that bounced away from your landing page. Tracking bounce rate is a good metric to track because it gives you a quick overview of your landing page performance.
In email marketing: With the bounce metric, a marketer can understand how many emails were not delivered because of old or inactive email addresses for instance.
Reasons to track Bounces on your Website
Tracking bounces as a single metric gives you not that many insights especially not in web analytics. But, this metric is good to follow in combination with the total visits of a landing page which is called the bounce rate.
Note: When you have a single-page website, where all your content is on one page and there are no subpages, a bounce-rate is not representable to tell you about your performance.
Tracking bounces in email analytics
Understanding the bounce types and reasons give valuable information about your email marketing. Minimizing email bounces is important since it affects future email deliverables as well as your overall spam ranking. Email service providers give scorings which identify the reputation of a sender and this can lead to a potential listing as a spammer. The number of bounces can have an impact on this rating.
You can work on your email bounces by checking that emails are correctly written and only delivered to working email. In case of hard bounces, it is recommended to remove the respective email address from your address list or to contact the email service provider to have a look at the reasons and fix it.
Common variations of Bounces
Within email marketing the following categories can be found.
| Name | Description | Platform |
|---|---|---|
| Bounce Rate | The percentage of users that left a landing page without visiting any other landing page on a website. | Google analytics |
| Hard bounces | When an email cannot be delivered for good, it is called a hard bounce. Such cases can be for example an email address, which is permanently deleted. | Email marketing Analytics |
| Soft bounces | When an email cannot be delivered in a short-term, it is called a soft bounce. For soft bounces there can be multiple reasons for example email server is down or mailbox is full. | Email marketing analytics |
| Pending bounce | This is a metric that informs that an email has not been delivered due to a technical error. As the word pending indicates, it is a temporary delay. | Hubspot |
How can tracking Bounces help you to become more data-driven?
Tracking website bounces is a metric that tells you one of the most important aspects of your marketing strategy – Is your content appealing and is it targeting the right audience that lands on your website?
This is a metric that you should check regularly and find out the industry average for bounces. Analysis of the bounces across all of your landing pages can give you a good understanding of how your landing pages are performing and wherein the user journey prospects are leaving your site.
It is important to identify landing pages where you do not want your users to bounce away. Such pages can be for example fill out forms, purchase pages, login pages etc. For example, if a certain purchase funnel landing page has too many bounces, it can be a good idea to start further optimization of that certain landing page to decrease the number of bounces and keep the users on your site.
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Additional information on Bounces
- Have a look at this guide on email bounces
- Read more about the important metric – Bounce rate
- Check out this great guide on email bounces and how you can lower the amount of bounces