Know-How Exchange : Research/Metrics

The bounce rate of 22% suggests people are finding what they want. The issue may be whether you're converting them all, or whether they're just coming for some other reason and not intending to buy.

We were getting a bounce rate of 25-30% and were proud of ourselves until we realized the majority of site visitors were just price shopping and then using our prices to negotiate lower prices elsewhere.

We put a notification message on the website that said "We don't give prices online" (in a more positive way, of course, and with a great explanation). Our bounce rate went up to 45-50% almost immediately, but our conversion rate more than tripled, so we made more money when it was all said and done.

Net: Don't worry so much about your bounce rate. Focus instead on your conversion rate. You don't put bounce rate in the bank. And if it really does matter to you, 22% is pretty good. It's hard to do much better than that.

First off let me say a 22% bounce rate is really good from our experience an acceptable bounce rate to us is 40-45% . As mgoodman pointed this is an obvious metric to improve but not as impotant as conversions to accomplish your goals. To try to answer your question

Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who exit your site from the landing page itself without navigating any further within X number of seconds. High bounce rate on a page could mean that it is highly inefficient in appealing visitors to use your site.

Exit rate is the percentage of visitors exiting or leaving your site from a particular page on your site. Exit rate is calculated for every page separately because it is the property of an individual page independent of any other page on the site.

An exit rate helps determine where there are other problems on your site. For example, if visitors click from your landing page to a category and then to the product page but before making a purchase leave, then you know that there must be something preventing them from completing the process.

I really feel though that Google's analytics data is skewed but beggars cannot be picky right? Hope this helps