What, precisely, is bounce rate? Googles description is pretty general, and I don't really understand it. When people arrive at my site, eventually they have to leave. Somehow, they way they leave determines if it is a bounce or not, but since no one is clicking on my ads, I'd think the bounce rate would be 100%. I don't have any goals selected yet, so that can't have anything to do with it.

About goals, I don't have any "Thank you for..." pages, except for link submissions, and don't know what use that would be as a goal, since I can tell when someone submits a link, anyhow. So, do you use goals, and if so, how do they help, and do you use information about bounces to help you, and if so, how?

If I am correct, bounce rate is the amout you recieve per click or impression or something like that.

When someone visits your site and leaves on the same page they entered without having visited another page that someone is said to have bounced from your site.

Say 100 people land on any page of your site. 60 of them click through to other pages. The other 40 leave after only seeing the one page they landed on.

You're bounce rate is then 40/100 or 40%

Bounce rates aren't about people clicking on ads. It's simply whether or not they visit more than one page on your site during their visit.

As far as what is a good bounce rate it depends on your industry and the topic of your site and where your traffic is coming from. Generally you want to have a lower bounce rate, but that's not an absolute. For example if you're hoping people will click on your AdSense ads you'd probably be very happy if they land on your site and click the first ad they see without visiting a second page on your site. That would be a 100% bounce rate, but it wouldn't be bad from your point of view.