The bleed is used for all objects overlapping, the border of your document. Let's say you working on a brochure with images against the sides of your pages. You'll supply the printer with a document somewhat larger than the final document will be.
After the brochure is printed it will be cropped to its correct size. The bleed in your document gives the cropping some room for error. The paper itself can expand or contract, the cropping machine could setup wrong or the person working on the brochure could make a mistake. There are a lot of factors that could go wrong with cropping, if you wouldn't be using bleed the images wouldn't be neatly aligned with the side of your printed document.
Bleed and crop marks on the left, cropped document on the right
For every job you sent to the printer you need to place the crop marks on your document. For most of the jobs, please set the crop marks at 1/8 inches for business card, post card, poster, etc., and 1/4 inches for booklet, program book or magazine.
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