Why does the bounce rate matter - Web users coming from the search engine look for specific pages on the Web and when they have found the page on your site and have read it they will usually be ready to move on. Unless you are running CPM campaigns or want to build social traffic then the bounce rate is a pretty worthless stat to use.
Because... If someone is looking for a specific something, usually that something connects to more of a general niche. For Example: I look up "At home teeth whitening" Site A - Good information. But hard to read. Bad grammar. Poor quality. = Me exiting the page. Site B - Good information. Easy to follow. Looks great. Great quality. = Me viewing the other site pages. Those with a high bounce rate will say that it's not important, and maybe it's not for their purpose. However, I like having quality readers and returning visitors, so for me, a low bounce rate is important.
Someone could be bouncing away from a page on every occasion, but they could be clicking on Adsense ads, affiliate links, site recommendations etc and so I don't know how it can be used to measure the quality of a blog/site! Before I moved to Analytics i'd never even heard of this stat before lol.
If you have a quality site, people will come back regardless of whether or not they click the advertisements. It's common sense. If you're on a cool site, and you click an ad, you'll probably go back to that site if it was cool enough. Again, if you don't care about returning visitors, subscribers, or multiple page impressions, then who cares what I say. However, if you do, (which I definitely recommend for you affiliated bloggers - subscribers and reader trust is great for more sales!), then I definitely recommend trying to lower your bounce rate.
my bounce rate is at about 91%, its not a blog... one thing though they get exactly what there looking for, theres pretty much no need to go to a second page for my site... i get over 20k uniques a day to it almost all from google.... bounce rate is a good measure if your testing different designs on the same site and content etc... i guess if you did a search online for something like What time is it in france, you land on a page that shows you the time, what else do you need? he may have links to USA time and China's time but your not interested all you wanted was what you got.
I fully agree with that as a publisher it's never about getting people spend more time on my site, but the give them the answer to their question they used on Google to find my page hence I publish to give a complete answer on the ONE page I compare with my own surfing habits i search - click the most appealing result, find what i need - leave the site if i LIKE the result and use such topics more often, then I bookmark that site or just remember the site-name for later reference I have some 20k uv/day and enjoy since many years a high direct request number (13+%) that appears more important to me as a value-indicator than people hanging out on a site just to kill time or keep on searching and searching page after page there is loots to do in life, I love active people with a precise goal active people are goal oriented - have a question - solve the question and move on with their own goal oriented work rather than getting lost in the web forgetting their own work/goal there are many high quality sites that offer a complete reply to a query on a single page for example - merriam webster - apache.org - many technical howtos and other sites providing solutions and answers rather than chit chat oriented sites the more precise title and keywords used in SEO are relevant for that page and the more quality oriented a publisher is, the more likely a surfer gets ALL what he needs on the very first page found. essence: I belief that bounce rate is of very relative value - depending on the goal of a publisher. there might be more valuable factors than bounce rate such as - time spent on a site / day/user - direct requests - number of RSS subscribers and requests from RSS feeds the most important always is highest possible customer satisfaction and highest efficiency to achieve such. how that is done may depend on topic of a site and the goal of that publisher