Brush aside the trees to see the forest
When managing only the bounce rate can hurt you.
Setting goals in your Analytics will help you, but what you might find is that your high-value pages (your goals) also are typically attractive and helpful pages to your users. It’s also reasonable to assume you’ll spend some time and effort improving the SEO on those very same pages.
Take for example a News site, or a Food site, or a TV Station. They all have key pages that are consider high value (news articles, recipes, or videos, to be specific). Well, those very same pages are also interesting and coveted by the users. It’s also reasonable that those content types are well represented in Search Engines; in fact those three types of content get special treatment from Google (Google News, Recipes, and Videos).
Taking all this into account, reality sets in and these kind of sites notice large bounce rates on those single pages. Is that good? Is that bad? I’m very Gestalt about the whole thing; it is what it is, and it needs to be evaluated in context. There’s no normal, there are useful comparisons but what’s normal for one site, is weird for another.
So take for example one part of the organization that is measured on bounce rates. When it goes up, they cry; when it goes down, they party.
Take then, another group in the company that targets a SEM campaign against those key pages and the bounce rate naturally goes up. Or, take as another example, a SEO effort triggers more inbound traffic directly to those key goal-pages, also resulting in a upward bounce rate. It may seem like the upward bounce rate is a bad thing, but if the overall goal successes are up, is it really a big deal? For some, yes; for others no.
The point: Having a focus on one metric, at the expense of others can cause you to miss the overall picture. Step away from the weeds, and look wholeistically every once in a while and re-callibrate your expectainos against your overall goals. One year you might really care about bounce rates, the next it’s all about conversions, then next it’s all about somthing else. You’re allowed; and should; change.
