Something has happened to my StumblUpon traffic. Something good.
I was drilling down into the inner bowels of Google Analytics and I looked at my bounce rate for StumbleUpon. The StumbleUpon bounce rate is notoriously bad, as it is from other social media sites like Digg or Reddit. The last time I checked, I remember the bounce rate being somewhere in the neighborhood of 90% (meaning 90% of the visitors to the site didn’t bother to go to another page).
October 2008 was my biggest month for traffic from StumbleUpon. I didn’t have one giant spike, rather it was spread across multiple articles. (I guess that is a good thing). My bounce rate for October was an astonishing 44%. 1.85 pages per visit and over 1 minute spent on the site. This is over 4,000 visits for the month.
I dug a little deeper. Some time between July 4 and July 8, my bounce rate for SumbleUpon dropped from the 90% range to the 40-45% range, and it has stayed there ever since. (the orange line in the chart is my bounce rate. Blue is pages per visit)
I have no idea why.
I didn’t make any major changes to the website that I can remember. I changed the theme of the site in August.
I should also note that in October, StumbleUpon seems to have hit a point where it is on autopilot. Things are getting stumbled without any doing on my part, and what is getting stumbled is all over the map. I have no rhyme or reason why it is happening, but I’m going to enjoy the ride.
Reddit can still drive more traffic, but the quality is still very poor. Bounce rates close to 100%.
3 replies on “StumbleUpon Traffic”
I’d like to take some credit 🙂 I just checked and notice i stumbled 6 of your posts in October, several of which i “discovered” …. having the SU toolbar helps for easy stumbling.
Ahh good ol stumble traffic. I always seem to have a decent bounce rate when getting traffic from there. It all depends on the content, especially the title. I guess people read the first few words and make their decision on whether or not they want to stay.
My SU traffic has always been A-Grade. Stats for 12 months from SU traffic as follows; Visits 40055, Pages Per Visit 2.29, Time 1.42, % New 92.72, Bounce Rate % 32.18 …. happy with that all day long.