Curses to the "no immediate replying deep in a thread" filter.

If you have a high bounce rate, you will inevitably have a low conversion rate.

If this were true, then you could use a low conversion rate as a proxy for making the decisions you are currently making based on bounce rate. If two metrics inenvitably say the same thing, ditch one of them. The interesting case would be when they differ. However, if your bounce rate and your conversion rates are telling you different things, then your conversion rate is right, because of the two metrics it is the one actually putting money in your pocket. If I were selling a product and the best thing I could say about it was "Either superflous, or wrong!", I would stop selling it. Everyone should stop selling bounce rate.

However, it is not the case that if you have a high bounce rate, you will inevitably have a low conversion rate. Many pages on my site have a high bounce rate, which is almost entirely due to my traffic acquisition strategy, which is organic SEO. Because a) Google is not infallible with regards to relevance and b) organic SEO is greatly helped by providing linkable resources, some of which can be consumed without leaving the page, this tends to increase my bounce rate relative to relying on, e.g., paid CPC traffic responding to an ad telling them they need to sign up for my free trial. Since customers pre-select for willingness to sign up, bounce rates among that traffic are much, much lower.

(In this case, as an artifact of an implementation detail, any interest in seeing the signup form will cause someone to be recorded as non-bounce. Of course, if I had implemented the form the other way and made that click do some JS wizardry to pop the form up in a lightbox, then the bounce rate would increase automatically. The fact that my bounce rate is very sensitive to my implementation details rather than any externally visible difference in user behavior should be a strong hint as to how useful it is(n't)!)

Of course, I don't have the luxury of telling customers on organic searchers "This site offers a free trial! Don't click here unless you're ready to sign up for it, you'll hurt my metrics!" and even if I did, wow, that would be a catastrophically stupid thing to do now wouldn't it. I make thousands of dollars off the organic traffic even if 70%+ on some pages satisfy their immediate desires without generating a second page view. (And if they satisfy their immediate desire and then link to my page from their blog or class home page then I am so far ahead of the game it isn't even funny.)

Bounce rates also reinforce a pageview-centric metrics model which was suboptimal but chosen for technical reasons years ago, and is now VERY suboptimal, given that we can have high engagement interactions these days without ever generating a second pageview, thanks to implementation details like Flash or AJAX. (For that matter, we can have high engagement intereactions without a FIRST pageview, because a good portion of the conversation occurs outside of our own websites. Given that I'm telling this to a social media consultant on a forum commenting about her blog I feel a heavy dose of Whoa This Is Meta at the moment.)

Folks interested in more detail on bounce rates and their inherent, ineradicable suckiness can read my blog post on it later this week.