Stumbleupon traffic bounce rate is amazing
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What is bounce rate?
A bounce is basically a visitor that loads a single page on your web site and then leaves the site without clicking anywhere. This would describe most Digg and other social voting sites really. If your bounce rate is 70%, out of a hundred new visitors 70 loaded just one page on your site, then left for good.
Why i love StumbleUpon
Ten days ago i wrote an article that was stumbled by many users, sending a spike of traffic from StumbleUpon.com. The article was first linked by (i think) problogger.com and later spread to many other blogs. This led to the article getting ‘liked’ by about a dozen stumblers. Those dozen stumblers sent a spike of 300 unique visitors my way. I kept getting about 15 referrals a day from StumbleUpon until there was a second, smaller spike of stumbles a week later, sending an extra 200 readers to the entry.
After each spike of traffic from SU i checked the analytics referrer logs for Su traffic which reported a 39% bounce rate from stumbleupon visitors. So from the 600 readers, 400 viewed more than that one page that got stumbled and checked out more from my site. In comparison, traffic from shoemoney.com, my biggest referral traffic, bounced at a rate of 75%, and Google organic traffic at 68%.
Why does StumbleUpon traffic has such a low bounce rate? It’s all about boredom.
StumbleUpon has a huge advantage over digg traffic, the next cool site is always a link away. With Digg, you have to press the back button more than once to return from a visited link to the Digg main page. StumbleUpon has it’s own toolbar which is always available no matter the page you’re reading, so an SU visitor doesn’t have to worry about typing URLs or hunting down bookmarks to return to SU’s main page.
StumbleUpon traffic is highly targeted
Digg-type sites focus on one large mob of users with mostly random interests. True, Digg does have categories but most of the traffic will come from the Digg main page. Stumblers configure their profile and only see sites they are interested in. This explains the phenomenal bounce rate for SU traffic.
What i could have done better: Display popular posts
When the first wave of stumbles hit i was using a layout that did not display top or related posts at all, and i am certain having either would have reduced the bounce rate even more.
Add a “stumble this” button
I should have added a StumbleUpon graphic after the entry or even a line reading “If you enjoyed this please Stumble it” to remind people to thumbs-up the page.
October 8th, 2007 at 11:03 pm
Thanks for explaining this. I had been wondering.
October 9th, 2007 at 3:24 am
SU traffic looks great, i’ve never seen a bounce % like that even with google traffic.
October 9th, 2007 at 10:47 am
I have my site in stumble upon. I have witness such phenomenon. But I am not getting consistent traffic from SU. Is there anything I could do to increase the visibility of my site in SU
October 9th, 2007 at 11:48 am
I’ve experienced this before but I have also experienced the other side of the coin as well where my bounce rate was 90%. I’m a stumbler myself so i know stumblers can be very fickle and if stumbling will very quickly hit that stumble button if they don’t see something that drags them in.
October 11th, 2007 at 12:18 am
Bounce rate might vary depending on the niche really. One of the things that helped a lot with stumbleupon was adding the “Did you enjoy reading this article? Stumble it” link after each article. This took this article from 20 thumbs up two days ago, to 50 yesterday, which i think is either the maximum visible number or the max number of votes for a page. I might be wrong on the actual number but it’s been at 50 stumbles for a while now and the page is still getting consistent traffic and more reviews.
November 8th, 2007 at 7:25 am
[…] feed. Thanks for visiting!NewestOnTheNet.com has a huge list of StumbleUpon articles, with my own StumbleUpon bounce rate article in there too. I haven’t had the time to go through everything yet, but a couple of […]
November 8th, 2007 at 9:45 am
[…] 19. StumbleUpon Traffic Bounce Rate is Amazing […]
November 30th, 2007 at 9:45 am
not only is the bounce rate low but the page per visit rate is very favourable, too. i don’t think i’ve ever had one lower than 1.8 from stumbleupon.
February 24th, 2008 at 8:13 pm
[…] be a great source of traffic. This is true both in terms of the quantity of traffic as well as the quality of traffic that StumbleUpon […]
May 12th, 2008 at 3:14 pm
[…] http://www.serverdome.org/stumbleupon-traffic-bounce-rate-is-amazing/ […]
May 25th, 2008 at 11:56 am
Okay, I think you’ve convinced me to go ahead and try advertising on Stumble. Thanks for the shot of confidence. I’ve been thinking about it for a while but your article did it.
May 31st, 2008 at 2:50 pm
Okay, I’m in the process of trying it right now. Anybody that wants to do this should know that you apparently need a paypal account. So, I had to get one of those. Right now I’m having my campaign approved or rejected. I just thought everyone might like a heads up about paypal in case they don’t have an account either.
Cheers,
JD
June 5th, 2008 at 2:29 am
[…] Server Dome - Display popular posts to entice stumblers to read […]