The other day I went to check my web statistics and noticed that one of my sites had experienced a rather large boost in that day’s traffic. This site usually gets 6 - 12 visits per day, but it had racked up 38 visits. Needless to say I was curious about what had happened. After poking around my Google Analytics for minute, I figured that StumbleUpon had caused the boost in web traffic. I had just been part of my first Stumble Effect.
At that point, I really wasn’t sure how StumbleUpon worked, and really I’m still not totally clear. Yesterday I woke up and was sad to see that my traffic had returned to normal levels, I decided to give StumbleUpon another whirl and see if I could get the Stumble Effect to work for me. Turns out you have to download the StumbleUpon browser bar, and things start to make a lot more sense. You can click the “Stumble” button and it takes you to sites that other people have liked. Then you vote Yes or No for the site, and it gives you more targeted sites that you will like.
The good stuff happens when you start recording pages and then other people get directed to them. I went to one of my most popular posts and added it to my list. I checked back a few hours later and I had over 90 visitors that had been directed by StumbleUpon. By the end of the day the Stumble Effect had sent 95 visitors to my site. Here’s the statistics for an average visitors from StumbleUpon:
Pages/Visit: 1.98
Avg Time on Site: 1:31
Bounce Rate: 29%
Of course these are all open to interpretation. The Bounce Rate seems the best indicator in this instance. That means that of the people who were directed to the specific post that I submitted to StumbleUpon, 29% did not click to another page on my site - meaning that 71% did click to another page on my site. The Average Time on Site is often hard to interpret because they could click to the homepage and spend 10 minutes reading all the posts there, but it would only register the time from their last click - so if they clicked to the homepage at 1:30, and then went to another site after reading the homepage for ten minutes, it would register their visit as 1:30.
In the end, I wasn’t prepared for this Stumble Effect. I tried to add additional “Grab my RSS Feed” links, but I was too late. Most of the Stumble Effect happens within a one hour time frame, so by the time I added my additional links, the Stumble Effect was over. I don’t have any additional RSS subscribers today. Also, the reach of your Stumble Effect is based on how many “Friends” you have on the site - so I’ve got to start making nice and shaking hands.