In terms of bounce rate, it's actually pretty annoying to THINK you are going to find the right page when you Google it, only to discover something useless to you. So I try to keep bounce rates low because it increases customer happiness.
I see what you're saying in the first sentence but I do not think that the second sentence follows from it. For customers who are in goal-directed mode, often times a bounce is the positive outcome and multiple page views are the negative outcome.
As a trivial example: suppose someone Googles [Rackspace affiliate program phone number]. Their intent is crystal clear: they want to call you. http://www.rackspace.com/information/contactus.php achieves their task and will almost certainly result in a bounce. If you wanted to reduce your bounce rate, you could put the contact link four clicks down and do several millions in usability research devoted to discovering new, innovative ways to get people not to click on it, but that would be prioritizing a meaningless and arbitrary metric over your customer satisfaction.
P.S. If there is anyone reading this from Google please don't get any ideas about new research projects from the above paragraph.
Yes, if you define bounce rate by number of pageviews, then this holds true. I wish I could have defined bounce as visitors who spend less than say 10 seconds on website but calculating exact time on page in realtime is very expensive operation which most web analytics tools don't do.
A typical example supporting your case would be a blog post. Most people come to your blog post via a link and they read the post and they go back to whatever they were doing. Even when web analytics tools will call them a bounce (because they just saw one page), I would say them non-bounce because they spent time doing what they came here for.
I see what you're saying in the first sentence but I do not think that the second sentence follows from it. For customers who are in goal-directed mode, often times a bounce is the positive outcome and multiple page views are the negative outcome.
As a trivial example: suppose someone Googles [Rackspace affiliate program phone number]. Their intent is crystal clear: they want to call you. http://www.rackspace.com/information/contactus.php achieves their task and will almost certainly result in a bounce. If you wanted to reduce your bounce rate, you could put the contact link four clicks down and do several millions in usability research devoted to discovering new, innovative ways to get people not to click on it, but that would be prioritizing a meaningless and arbitrary metric over your customer satisfaction.
P.S. If there is anyone reading this from Google please don't get any ideas about new research projects from the above paragraph.