My StumbleUpon Analysis - A Poor 500% Traffic Increase
5 November, 2007 - Social Media - 52 Comments
Yesterday, compared to an average Sunday, I had a 500% increase in traffic to my blog. How? You ask. StumbleUpon, I answer. Was it good? No, it sucked! Most bloggers have wrote about StumbleUpon in the past. Kevin at BloggingTips. John Chow and Skellie at ProBlogger, just to name a few. Following the trend, here’s the story of my first date with StumbleUpon.
The Short Story
My first date with StumbleUpon started at 1pm and lasted a couple of hours. We had a great time on the face of things. She smiled and sent me lots of compliments (in the form of 101 visitors) and we had lots of fun. Unfortunately for her, she didn’t get laid. As we drove back to my place to take stock of the days events, I found a dirty little secret hiding down her blouse. So dirty, she even managed to manipulate my Google Analytics Sex Drive Statistics Logger. Luckily, I have a keen eye and I take note of a women’s signals. As we drove to my place, a quick look down her now three-quarter-open blouse revealed her true colours… the compliments she had been giving me all night were meaningless and of the worst quality!
The Long Story
First, let me give you a few stats about the StumbleUpon traffic:
- Page Stumbled: Finding the Perfect Prospect Ice Breaker
- StumbleUpon Review Page: stumbleupon.com/url/www.jamieharrop.com/2007/10/05/finding-the-perfect-prospect-ice-breaker
- 101 Visitors over approximately two hours
- 177 Page Views
- 1.75 pages per visit. The 4th highest pages per visit figure of the day, out of ten traffic sources
- A bounce rate of 32.67%. The lowest bounce rate of all traffic sources on the day
- 2min 5sec was the average time on site from a StumbleUpon user. This was the 3rd highest out of 10 traffic sources.
Looking at those stats, the traffic looks to be of very good quality. Looking at the pages per visit and number of page views, it appears as though a good percentage of the StumbleUpon traffic took it upon themselves to visit at least one more page on the blog after the initial Stumbled post.
However, pages per visit could mean that just two visitors browsed further in the site but did so a lot, or it could mean 40 out of the 101 visitors navigated to a second page. Or, as you’re about to find out, it could mean none of these. In fact, it could mean that StumbleUpon made the stats look much more enticing than they really are. Here is what I found after a lot of digging through my Analytics stats.
Multiple Page Views
I was lucky enough to be in my office when the wave of traffic got underway. I was watching the whole thing unfold using the “Live” WordPress plugin. As you can see from the screenshot to the right, the traffic was coming thick and fast. Click the screenshot to enlarge. As I was watching I began to notice that none of the visitors were moving around the site. They were simply visiting the Stumbled page and then leaving. Take a look at the screenshot again and look at the IP addresses in the red circle. You’ll notice some visitors were even refreshing the page several times creating multiple page views in the Live plugin.
After seeing this in the WordPress plugin, and after the traffic had died down, I decided to do some much needed digging in Analytics. I analysed everything about those 101 visitors from StumbleUpon and in the process I found some very useful features of Analytics that I didn’t know were there. (Future post: The Ultimate Guide to Google Analytics).
One of things I was able to do in Analytics was find out where all the visitors to the Stumbled page had gone to after they had visited the initial page. This is called the Entrance Path in Analytics (Content > Content By Title > Click your choice of page > Choose Entrance Paths from drop down menu). As you can see from the screenshot to the right (click to enlarge), Analytics shows in the “Then viewed these pages:” column 68 visitors went to the exact same page that was Stumbled. This means that after viewing ‘Finding the Perfect Prospect Ice Breaker’, 68 of those visitors viewed that post again without viewing any other page on the site. At first, this seemed very strange to me, but then I remembered about the IP addresses in the “Live” WordPress plugin. It was clear in there that several users had refreshed the page and created multiple page views.
Run the Math
To find out how many of the StumbleUpon users visited just one page (the Stumbled page), as opposed to the 1.75 pages that Analytics was showing me, I ran the math:
Number of visitors from StumbleUpon (101) multiplied by the average pages per visit from StumbUpon users (1.75) to find the total number of Page Views by StumbleUpon users = 176.75.
Round up that number to account for Analytics’ ability to cope with just two decimal places and you get 177 total page views from StumbleUpon users.
Now let’s take a look at the Entrance Sources for the Perfect Ice Breaker post. In the screenshot to the right, we see StumbleUpon users accounted for 177 page views on that post alone. And that, folks, shows you that not a single StumbleUpon user out of the 101 who visited me yesterday decided to go past the Stumbled post. They created 177 page views in total, and every single one of those was on the Perfect Ice Breaker post. Not a single visitor decided to dig deeper in to the site.
I could have quite easily looked at the 1.75 pages per visit statistic from StumbleUpon users and assumed that some of the StumbleUpon users had visited several pages on my blog. Instead, I chose to dig deeper and I’m glad I did. By looking at everything in Analytics, I found out that despite the 1.75 pages per visit statistic from Analytics, not a single StumbleUpon user had looked at a second page on my blog.
Being my first experience with StumbleUpon, I’m not sure if this quantity over quality approach is typical of StumbleUpon traffic. I gave the traffic plenty of chance to navigate around my site. I even edited the Stumbled post to contain this paragraph at the top:
Welcome StumbleUpon users! - It seems right now I’m receiving a lot of visitors from StumbleUpon. I wanted to extend my warm welcome to you all and invite you to look around my site and subscribe to my RSS feed. Here are a few posts you might be interested in: What Makes an Entrepreneur?, Keep Your Customers Informed, and The Excitement of a Business First.
Because this is my first experience with StumbleUpon, I’m looking to you for your opinions and experiences. Has StumbleUpon sent you quality traffic? If so, why do you think the traffic I received was poor? Was the Stumbled post just not interesting to most StumbleUpon users, or was there another factor?
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Posted on 5 November, 2007 by Jamie Harrop
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My StumbleUpon Analysis - A Poor 500% Traffic Increase…
Compared to an average Sunday, I had a 500% increase in traffic to my blog. How? You ask. StumbleUpon, I answer. Was it good? No, it sucked! As I watched the traffic come in using my WordPress Live plugin, I was excited to see thick and fast action… …
Good post Jamie. I think if you did an analysis of traffic to individual posts via search engines though you would see a similar pattern. The visitor has came across your post but the hard part is keeping them there. This is where a good blog design and easy navigation comes in. You want to encourage the reader to subscribe and to drop by your blog again.
Of course, by the very nature of stumbleupon, there is an increased chance of someone visiting your post and leaving because your post might not have been what they had been searching for so they simply click the ’stumble’ button. However, I believe this happens with traffic from search engines too (ie. they click the back button).
Thanks for commenting, Kevin.
You make a good point. Is the StumbleUpon traffic just the same as all other referrals of this nature? Ya know what, I’m not sure and that’s why you just sparked an idea for a new post… “Google Vs StumbleUpon - The Traffic Wars”.
Seriously, I think I’ll do the same analysis on the Google traffic I get to see what the results are. That would only be fair.
A few questions.
1. Did you see any increase in advertising revenue?
2. Did you see any increase in RSS subscribers?
3. Did you see any increase in number of visitors outside of the heavy stumble period?
My observation is about the same as yours when it comes to the initial stumble period. However, I’ve noticed an increase of all 3 of the factors I mentioned above over the next 5-7 days.
You may also get a second wave of traffic as someone else finds your article and favorites it. Each wave seems to add just a little bit more, maybe converting about 1-5% of those one-timers to long time readers.
I did see a small increase in RSS subscribers, Frank. Although I would take a guess and say that was due to other reasons, as opposed to the Stumble.
Your comment is very interesting. I guess I should be monitoring my stats even more closely than usual over the next week to see if I notice an increase.
Thanks Frank! I guess I should still maintain some hope. 
I just stumbled this one for you. Get your stat-o-meter ready
Oh boy! You’ve done it now, Frank. This means I have to stay up all night to watch my Live WordPress plugin.
Thanks Frank! Can’t wait to see what the results are, if any.
Great post! I have had days like that from SU, and now I need to go back and review my stats. Thanks for pointing out some of the analytics info, and can’t wait to read the expanded post about them.
New RSS subscriber here!
Hey Elliott,
Thanks for your comment and thanks for subscribing.
I really would advise checking your stats a little more closely on days you have had SU traffic. You never know what you might find. I was really surprised when I found what I did when I did my digging.
Jamie,
I have checked them briefly and it appears as though I still have a pretty high bounce rate. Not sure if I am spread to thin with my topics, or I am just drawing people for just the one article.
Maybe a little more digging will help narrow down why it is so high.
Would you mind sharing your bounce rate, Elliott?
Really, my bounce rate from the SU users yesterday was 100%, because all 101 visitors exited the site without navigating to another page. Analytics shows a bounce rate of 32.67%, but after my digging we know this isn’t true. (It showed this figure because Analytics treated the Stumbled page refreshes as a second page visit).
I’ll be most interested to see what your Entrance Path for the Stumbled page looks like. This will show you where the SU traffic navigated to after visiting the Stumbled page (that is, if they navigated anywhere at all). To view it in Analytics, go to Content > Content By Title > Click your Stumbled page > Choose Entrance Paths from drop down menu (obviously make sure the correct date is chosen in the calendar too). For what it’s worth, you might want to blog about the results, rather than write them in a comment here, but I’m sure you were going to do that anyway.
StumbleUpon traffic to select articles on my site have been very nice to my Adsense account!
Take tonight for example - an article got stumbled, received around 500 hits withing 120 mins or so, and it pulled in 38 clicks on decent paying ads
So there are benefits, for sure.
So SU users really do click ads, I see. I guess I better get that new design up so I can make room for a little advertising and finally capitalise on all this SU traffic.
Thanks for commenting, VoteSavvy.
How effective StumbleUpon is depends on the site, more than anything. As Kevin Muldoon said, SU will often have a high bounce rate by it’s very nature.
In my experience, this is especially true for SU visitors on blogs.
It’s just a matter of targetting. SU is a great traffic source if you have the right type of site for it.
It will happily send you 10,000+ unique visitors every day for months on end. With a bounce rate of
.. With a bounce rate of
Thanks for commenting, MoonBuggy.
I’m not sure why your bounce rate figure kept getting cut off. Sorry about that.
The thing I’ve noticed most about StumbleUpon is it seems relatively easy to get a good stream of traffic. Like you said, it will happily send you thousands of visitors without too much effort. Maintaining those visitors is the hard part… but that’s the same with all traffic sources.
I wonder if prefetch caused the duplication? Firefox has that habit and I noticed even with prefetch turned off and logged in on stumbleupon I’m being asked to accept cookies before I stumble. I’ve noticed that the cookies are for the next site I stumble.
Alex
That’s interesting, Alex.
I had to look up “prefetch”, but having read a quick description of it, I guess that could be part of the problem.
StumbleUpon can indeed bring fast traffic to your site… usually the bounce rate is very low as well. But the conversion on SU traffic is extremely low!!!
I would say SU’s traffic generally doesn’t stick, but it’s a good way to let people know you’re around and aware that your site exist.
Then it comes to Alexa ranking, it’s flawed when you have SU kind of page views too.
Brand awareness via SU traffic. I guess that makes sense.
Thanks for commenting, Jude.
[...] My StumbleUpon Analysis - A Poor 500% Traffic Increase - Jame Harrop does an anylsis of his stumbleupon traffic. [...]
I to have done a breakdown of stumble upon traffic. At first I did receive a flood of traffic to my blog with out much action. I went back to my blog and made some changes, and received a fraction of an increase in subscribers. But as time goes on the traffic gets a little more consistant and beneficial.
I think time brings the credibility factor and makes SU more valuable
http://www.PassportMentors.com
I would be interested to hear what changes you made, Megan. If you get chance, please do share them with us.
[...] seems my analysis of StumbleUpon traffic was a real hit for a lot of people. For the last 12 hours, my blog has been inundated with traffic. [...]
Great post Megan
Thanks for the great tips!
Stumbled on this..
I’m not a blogger, so I’m not really that clued up on all this “how much traffic from what sources” stuff that I keep coming across.
However, I know from my own stumbling habits that I rarely look at the rest of a site or blog unless the page I’ve stumbled on is exceptional. Good sites get a thumbs up then I move on, but its very rare I go any further into a site.
I think the majority of the traffic people get from Stumble tends to be people with habits like mine. Exceptional content as opposed to repeatedly getting posts submitted seems to be the best way to drive people further into your site and get those RSS Subscribers/whatever it is you blog people want other than ad clicks!
Pointless rambling about stuff I’m sure you know aside, nicely written post and I’ll be having a look around =]
Thanks for the very insightful comment, Lora.
It’s really useful to hear from an actual StumbleUpon user who can share their normal Stumbling habits.
In this latest wave of Stumble traffic, I’ve actually seen an increase in people who are looking elsewhere around the site. I guess I should crunch the numbers again to see what percentage have moved around, but from general monitoring that I’ve done it appears the Stumble for this post was much more successful in terms of traffic quality than my first Stumble early in the week.
[...] My StumbleUpon Analysis - A Poor 500% Traffic Increase [...]
Hi there, I found your blog while reading comments at John Chow dot com.
I’ve written a couple of blog entries about my experiences with StumbleUpon - I linked to one of them in the URI field above. An earlier entry is linked from that one.
Whether people move around your site is secondary to the man question you should be asking: are you submitting a good blog entry?
I skimmed the blog entry you submitted. In my opinion, while it’s not a bad entry, it isn’t organised in the “upside-down pyramid” format that StumbleUpon users need to stop them moving on before they finish reading, let alone before they check out your site.
With new visitors, you have to grab attention as soon as possible, and keep it. This is even more true of StumbleUpon users because it’s so easy to click the Stumble button and just move on.
Try putting the most interesting and revealing content at the top of the blog entry. Then put the finer points at the end. Sometimes it helps to summarise the entry at the top - Wikipedia sometimes does this with their “this page in a nutshell” info box. A different medium, but the same idea can work very well.
My blog has a very low RSS count but the blog entries have started doing quite well thanks to StumbleUpon. Keep submitting entries every so often, and see what works and what doesn’t. It’s very much a case of trial and error.
Thanks for the fantastic comment, Ben.
I do believe you’re correct. Grabbing their attention with the facts and then telling the story will probably work better. I’ll try that next time!
Thanks, once again!
Great observations. I had a similar experience last week: my blog, which usually gets around 40 visitors per day with the occasional spike to twice that pulled in 700 people from StumbleUpon in one day. All the stats looked good: decent time on site, a high percentage of unique visitors, very low bounce rate, etc. The conversion, however, was lousy. It makes me wonder if there’s something artifactual going on between the SU toolbar and Google Analytics. I know when I stumble, I flip through 10-20 pages for every one I stop and read; I have a hard time believing the stats are accurate.
Thanks for commenting, Dr. Pete.
I’m glad I’m not the only person experiencing poor traffic from SU.
[...] My StumbleUpon Analysis - A Poor 500% Traffic Increase - Jamie Harrop did an fantastic job and analyzing his StumbleUpon traffic both the positives and the negatives. I just recently received a bunch of stumble traffic and can agree with his sentiments. [...]
[...] my recent StumbleUpon research and analysis, I found several features within Google Analytics that I never knew existed. It was time to do some [...]
[...] numbers. Disadvantages: In general, the traffic you receive tends to be of poor quality as seen by Jamie. Additionally, not all of the posts you stumble will end up generating a sizable amount of traffic. [...]
Interesting post Jamie.
You’ve analysed this in a huge amount of detail, but the results I got from Stumble Users were really quite different.
On average, my blog gets 20 - 40 visits/day. On Sunday however, this number was 222 - thanks to StumbleUpon.
I haven’t analysed it as much as you have, but my bounce rate dropped from 72% to around 60% just over one day - I’m not sure if refreshing the page counts as a bounced visit or not - could you clarify?
If it does, it’s quite interesting that the experiences we had from StumbleUpon have been so different.
[...] My StumbleUpon Analysis - A Poor 500% Traffic Increase by Jamie Harrop. [...]
A couple of thoughts:
1. Someone should take the Seth Godin plugin (or another like it) and modify it so that it recognizes referrals from an SU page. You could set it up to present some special greeting enticing the visitor to check out similar posts on your page.
2. SU would be well served to build a similar service/plugin. Doing so would build value with the content providers.
Hi David,
Thanks for the comment.
You’re referring to the “What would Seth Godin do?” plugin, right? With your suggested modifications, it would certainly be very useful.
If I had the knowledge, I would give it a go myself, but my knowledge of developing plugins is very limited.
Hey, I noticed you’re in Cleveland. My business partner is in Akron, and I’ll hopefully be flying in there in late January.
I only know enough about php to be dangerous.
The WWSG plugin sets and checks for the existence of a cookie. Replacing the check for the SU referrer URL would let the site owner know when the individual was arriving from the SU site. Anyone with serious skills could probably crank it out in a day.
I’m actually north of Dayton (in Ohio). Cleveland in January, I hope you don’t catch too much bad weather.
I decided to try SU, and I’m confused! According to their stats the blog received 20 visitors, but Google analytics shows only 2 from SU… So, what an earth?????
Hi Jamie - I guess only time will tell. When I’m stumbling, I don’t often visit more than one page, but I’ll often go back to visit the same blog, either by subscribing, or through my StumbleUpon account.
I had a huge traffic surge a few weeks ago due to StumbleUpon. And although traffic did drop off after the first few days, I still get at least double what I was getting before that on most days.
Great post (I gave you a digg, stumbles I’ve found are worthless). Today it said i had 432 stumbleupon visitors, yet only 39 unique visitors from that. And a 19% new visitor ratio. Stumbleupon fakes statistics somehow.
Thanks Ryan!
I have found stumble upon visitors to be pretty good overall. There is something going on with the statistics, because often I get the same visitor hitting my homepage three times within a few minutes. Lot’s of stumblers have read multiple posts on my site though. It might be because I have navigation information at the bottom of my page, so when users are done reading they have choices presented to them on where to go next.
Check it out if you like http://www.thisistech.com
–Mike
Mike’s last blog post..Rube Goldberg Competition: Building a Hamburger in 156 Steps
Interesting… I have just started to poke at Stumble Upon, and as a test, I stumbled one of my own blog posts. It caused a minor spike in traffic, but not a lasting one.
Maybe I missed something here, but why would people simply refresh the page in SU? I remember when I used to belong to BlogExplosion, and the way that worked was for each blog you visited through their portal, you would receive a return visit through the portal. It caused a huge distortion in my traffic, and I realized that a number of people were hovering on my site merely for the 35 seconds required to get a hitback.
Kate Hutchinson’s last blog post..Busy As A Bee
Hey Kate,
Thanks for stopping by.
Ya know, I still haven’t figured out why SU users refresh the page. I suspect it is something related to the SU system causing false page hits, rather than the users physically refreshing the page.
It’s something I’ve been wondering ever since I did this research, but I’ve never been able to come to a firm conclusion.
Your titles are a permalink, even when already on the page - a lot of themes are like that. Some users are probably clicking on the title to make sure they’re already at the full version of the page.
Also, they may be checking to see how many people already reviewed the page, and what they said, and then clicking the back button.
Don’t think of Su traffic like Search traffic. Regular SU visitors use SU like an RSS-enabled daily newspaper. First-timers may wander on through via the toolbar and not decide to read. Social Media subscribers may unsub after getting a closer look at your blog. It’s just a little different.
Over time, traffic and relationships can build. I wouldn’t assess what’s going on based on a single encounter. Social media is about relationships.
Elizabeth Able’s last blog post..A Six-Month Checkup
[...] - My StumbleUpon Analysis - A Poor 500% Traffic Increase [...]
Is nice to see some of you make advertising money off those stumble visitors. I’ve never had much luck with the social bookmarking visits. search engine traffic however is a much different story.
BlogMeTheMoney’s last blog post..Weekend Quick Picks: Edition 3