April 11th, 2008 - 6 Comments
The Power of StumbleUpon…
This site has been in soft launch mode since it went live, meaning that I haven’t been shouting from the rooftops that it exists, so that I could quietly watch the effects of various tweaks I made to it’s search engine rankings.
So I was surprised to log in to my Google Analytics and find I had 100 visits on April 4th. Curious as to how 100 people had suddenly discovered my site on the same day I looked through the traffic sources and found… StumbeUpon.com.
StumbleUpon is primarily a way to discover new sites, and to share sites you like with others. You can install a toolbar in your browser which allows you to quickly add a site to StumbleUpon, review it, or be served up a random site and give it a thumbs up or a thumbs down – StumbleUpon also has social aspects to it (mandatory these days!) and a host of great features.
As I am signed up with StumbleUpon I was able to discover that afarnsworth had found my blog post on inbound links and had given it a thumbs up.
This was a timely reminder of how useful StumbleUpon is for sites wishing to build up new traffic, something I knew from my experience with BifSniff.com. If we look at the traffic to BifSniff from January 1st 2007 to January 1st 2008 we can see that StumbleUpon is number 4 in the list of referring sites.
Stumbleupon accounted for 9.45% percent of all traffic to BifSniff in that year, and that was with little or no input on StumbleUpon on my part – but what is even more interesting than the volume of traffic is the bounce rate. Bounce rate is the percentage of people who land on your site, look at the page they landed on, and leave – most sites will want people to stick around, have a look at some other stuff, and maybe even buy something or become a member or subscriber or whatever else the goal of your website might be.
The bounce rate for BifSniff has always been high – it doesn’t have clear goals, it’s a simple blog for fun. The bounce rate for anyone coming to BifSniff through Google is 71.48%, but the bounce rate for traffic from StumbleUpon is 30.91%.
Why the bounce rate from StumbleUpon is lower is something for another discussion – perhaps the focus of the site means that the userbase are simply more open to exploring sites once they find them, or it could be down to how exactly people discover new sites on StumbleUpon – if they are following links from other StumbleUpon users they trust then perhaps they are more likely to explore your site.
I’m not the only one who sees lower bounce rates from StumbleUpon visitors either, Donncha reported similar findings on his blog a while back.
So if you’re not a member of StumbleUpon, I recommend signing up. I know that after this reminder, I will be increasing my activity on StumbleUpon and adding more sites and pages (including my own) to the StumbleUpon database!
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6 Responses to “The Power of StumbleUpon…”
StumbleUpon is indeed a fantastic source of traffic however the reason for that low bounce rate is the nature of the stumbler. Very often people use that toolbar like a remote control on the TV with their finger hovered over the Stumble button ready to click through to the next site.
The key is to grab the users attention very quickly! I’m developing a free course about StumbleUpon at the moment and this is one of the topics I have talked about in depth. Click my name to check it out :-)
nice post frank, I wrote a wordpress plugin that can give your posts a better chance of being stumbled and dugg. It reminds visitors from these sites (via http referrer ) to vote for you if they liked the site.
PreBlogging
Nice article and congrats on the site. :)
StumbleUpon is indeed a great source of traffic to a website. However it is largely unfocused and brings an untargetted audience.
There is also a rather rabid community of trolls over there, whose sole purpose is to abuse anybody that so much as mentions SEO, or they think are only there to promote their own site. Tread carefully, my friend.
April 11th, 2008 at 2:04 pm by SEO UK