Thank you for the real world example.

Delivering relevant messaging is going to be the key in engaging your users. I will add a word of caution that with sales driven pages you will have some bounce and drop out. Due to the fact, you are trying to qualifying people for some reason (e.g. product, message, or lead) some will not fit that profile. While your goal should be to get the most qualified people to the page sometimes people sneak in. The word of caution is, in an effort to get bounce rate down do not water down your message to the point where this is no sales pitch. We can easily make a page that is softer in pitch, but what does that do to conversions? Friction is going to be inherently part of the system so when addressing bounce rate, make sure that while certain pages you test may have a positive effect on bounce, you are not suffering on the sales side.

Glad you were able to find that appropriate message for your audience and again thanks for sharing.

After a few months I figured that these visitors I was targeting ar enot interested in any type of sales pitch, what they actually wanted to see was portfolio page. So once I changed the landing page to portfolio page, bounces almost disappeared completely

In addition, you are right that users will vote on your content with the back button, especially for the PPC example here. Users are arriving from a search result page with other options (other competitors PPC ads and organic listings). Visitors are armed with the information that they can just hit the back button and try someone else. With knowing this, it can mean these visitors will tolerate even less with elements on your page, and how disconnected it is from the information they are looking for.

Remember, to visit another competitor on the web is not piling all the kids in the minivan and going to a store down the road. It is (as you put), a simple click of the mouse.

When a user has some expectations when she lands on your page, you have to continue her experience or she is going to be very unhappy and will vote with her click (on the Back button).

Arun