It goes without saying that bounces from ads are a bad thing because you're paying for a visitor who isn't converting.

IME, bounce rate is strongly influenced by ad copy. If you consider your average searcher to be somewhere on a continuum of qualification, you can capture a smaller or larger share of queries with greater or lower average levels of qualification respectively.

For example, an ad with copy that focuses strongly on sales, including information like price and specifications, will attract fewer clicks (the price puts people off "drive-by" research clicking) but those people who do click will be more qualified and more likely to convert.

There is also the school of thought that says that attracting less qualified traffic through your ads means that you have a higher CTR, which means a higher QS and lower CPC. Whether and to what degree this balances out the cost of the extra less-qualified clicks varies.

For example, an ad with copy that focuses strongly on sales, including information like price and specifications, will attract fewer clicks (the price puts people off "drive-by" research clicking) but those people who do click will be more qualified and more likely to convert.

I decided to try this out recently, adding explicit prices and details, but have yet to see any clear indication that this actually affects bounce rate. It even makes me wonder whether people read ads properly before they click, though I've also read that the public are apparently more discerning 'clickers' these days.

The reason I was questioning whether bounce is always a negative thing is that people surfing around for information might well only need the landing page to get what they're looking for, but that doesn't mean they won't return later a/o bookmark the site etc.

I guess that depends on the amount of repeat visitors you get, which should be trackable. If people do come back, then you're okay. The problem is that searchers are not always loyal and won't necessarily come back to your site to make the purchase (this is a big problem in the affiliate marketing game).

You can also track whether people are getting the information they need before bouncing by looking at data for time spent on page, and other indicators (number of javascript events if you use expanders for your information, and so forth). If people immediately bounce, then something is definitely wrong and you need to rethink either your ad copy, your landing page, or both. If people are spending a lot of time on the site, then you should focus on capturing them whilst they're there and figuring out ways to get them to come back if they do leave.

The other factor in bounce rate is of course your landing page quality. If people are still bouncing just as much with the different ad copy it's probably a good indication that your landing page is more important.

I'm just curious to know what kind of AVERAGE bounce rate you get from visits via your adwords campaigns. Maybe you'll say it completely depends on the campaign a/o sector but I'd still be interested to read about it. Over the last few months the average bounces for a travel industry campaign I run is 70%. Is this better/worse than average?

Hate to be the one that says this but... it really depends. You have to remember that bounce rate is calculated as someone who visits a single page and leaves. That means someone who lands on a page and quickly exits is treated the same as someone who lands on a page, reads all the content, but never visits any other page on the site. There are a lot of micro-level factors that come into play here such as content on the page, # of links, usability, etc.

instead of absolute measurement, analyze ppc bounce relative to bounce for that page's organic traffic.

it's still a very complicated question, but if your ppc BR is higher than your organic, get to work on improving targeting, especially adding negs.

while doing this comparison, you'll also be doing keyword discovery - the organic keywords are ppc thought fodder.

IMO Bounce rate should be as low as possible when you are using Google adwords. Primarily this fails the idea of targeted traffic.

The culprits could be the in-appropriate keyword that could be triggering a relevant ad, its just that the user has been looking for some thing, which is not there on your page.

We are going to get some bounces from curious / exploratory visitors and competition, but it shouldn't be alarming

So we must work hard on negative keywords and tighten the campaign for more targeted audience.

IMO the average bounce rate depends on the industry segment in which you are working, if you have lot of competition and lot visitors are interested in a product but you are not selling a product but an ebook related to that product. You are going to get lot of bounces

Just trying to give an example, which may or may not apply to you. However, I hope this helps you in understanding.

Bounce rate is a really bad metric to use. If there is absolutely no other way to measure the effectiveness of your campaign, then it might give you some insight, but you should usually just ignore it. The same goes for any individual metric, other than ROI.

There is usually a correlation between bounce rate and conversion ratio, but conversion ratio isn't nearly as important as you think it is. One piece of ad copy might get you a super high CTR but also a high bounce rate. You could qualify the traffic with a "better" ad, but your plummeting CTR may drive your CPC up. In this case your bounce rate is great, but traffic is so expensive that your ROI actually drops considerably.

The same situation could be true when targeting keywords or ad placements. Maybe one keyword is way more relevant, but a less relevant one (higher bounce rate) might be cheaper to the point where it actually performs better.

Basically my point is that your primary focus should be on split testing and monitoring actual performance against money spent on any given keyword / ad / page combination. Ideally you'll want to measure it in dollars spent to income generated, but if you're doing lead gen you want to measure cost per lead, etc.

Thanks DanAbbamont, you've mentioned a lot of things there that I've been thinking about in the campaign I was running.
I expect you're right about bounce rate being a bad metric. I suppose I was looking at it as in this particular case it was my only way to measure how effective the ads were in getting people into the site. But of course that's not the end of the story.

I had cases of keywords that were gaining a lot of clicks but were in fact fairly generic. Problem was, if I made the keywords any more specific I knew the CTR would plummet. So I made the ads as targeted as possible presuming that even though the search was generic, people would read the ad and make a decision before clicking. This worked ok but not as well as expected, at least from a bounce-rate perspective.