Perhaps you’ve heard about the latest craze on the internet: social bookmarking. I keep reading about how people are using one social bookmarking site called Stumbleupon.com to drive traffic to their websites, so I decided to run my own experiment on December 11, 2007. Amazing things happened.

As of the writing of this blog article, I typically get around 40 visitors each day to my website, and because I have a great traffic tracking system (read more about traffic tracking) I know exactly where these visitors come from, where they go once they get to my website, even how long they stay on each page.

Here’s what I did. I created a Stumbleupon.com account, entered some personal information, uploaded an image of myself, and tried to appear a part of the Stumbleupon.com community. I then rated my most popular blog article (about Citysearch Click Fraud). Next, I searched for other Stumbleupon users who might be sympathetic, people who read about pay-per-click, search engine marketing, web design, or even just the internet. I sent these people a message from within Stumbleupon, and asked them to rate my blog article. I only contacted three or four people.

Within minutes…literally…the Stumbleupon traffic hits started coming in. I was glued to my traffic tracking monitor - I was mesmerized. There were 4, 6, 10 people on my website at the same time! I wondered whether my server would crash. I watched, completely amazed. For around two hours, the visitors kept coming, and then the traffic slowly stopped. Here’s what the traffic for that day looked like (it’s the huge spike):

Amazing isn’t it. I received nearly six times my normal website traffic: 200 extra visitors. Impressive you say? Yes, it certainly is. And if all I cared about was getting visitors, I’d say the experiment was a success. But when I looked more carefully at what the visitors did once they got to my site, my heart sank. Out of the 200 visits, only two people went to other pages in my website. That’s a whopping 99% “bounce rate”, and it’s not good. It means folks didn’t find what they were looking for.

The traffic died down eventually, and after a few days stopped. In order for your webpage to keep being served up to folks that use Stumbleupon, it needs to be continually rated “thumbs up”. And I guess my blog article wasn’t that compelling. I was trying to explain this phenomena to one of my website clients and I used a balloon-in-a-crowd metaphor.

Here’s the metaphor: If you have a crowd of people and you throw a regular balloon to them, the balloon stays aloft as long as folks give it a little bump to keep it in the air. But if not enough folks bump it, it eventually falls to the floor, gets stepped on and pops. That’s apparently what happened to my blog article.

My wife did a similar experiment with some of her dog training articles, and they are still up in the air and being Stumbled. Her data suggests that around 0.5% - 1.5% of people who Stumbleupon her articles rated them with a thumbs up and gave them a bump. This was enough to keep her dog training articles in the Stumbleupon loop.

So her experiment was more of a success than mine was, and while we’re not sure exactly why, it may simply be that her product “free dog training advice” was found to be more useful by the Stumbleupon.com folks than mine was. I’m trying not to take it personally

If you have a Stumbleupon.com experience getting more traffic to your website, I’d love to hear about it.

AN UPDATE: 12/28/07
As an extension of my Stumbleupon experiment, I threw this article into the Stumbleupon mix as well, and it’s doing much much better than my Citysearch Click Fraud article. As of right now, this article has gotten 277 visitors, and has been kept in the Stumbleupon loop now for 5 days. While people are reading the article (average length of stay is 1 minute 39 seconds) the bounce rate remains very high at 96.5%.

Why is this article doing better in Stumbleupon than my Citysearch Click Fraud Article? Well, it’s about Stumbleupon for starters, a topic that’s perhaps more relevant to Stumbleupon users. Secondly, I put it in the “Stumbleupon” category - there is no “Citysearch” category (at least a main one), so I presume that I’ve done a better job at matching the article with the audience. As of right now, I’ve gotten a total of 10 good ratings - 3.6%, and these ratings have been enough to keep me in the loop.

Take Home Message: It is certainly is possible to drive a fair amount of traffic to your website using Stumbleupon.com, given that you can appropriately match your article with an audience, so that enough people will give it a good rating to keep it in play. However, at least for my business (small business website design) this traffic has a very high bounce rate, meaning that I’m very unlikely to get new clients as a result of someone reading this article. I’ve read that bounce rates for blog articles are higher than for other types of visitors, but I don’t have any actual data to support this. However, it’s possible that for a different kind of business, you would get a lower bounce rate, and if all you want is traffic (for advertising) then it might be just what you need.

Another Update: I’ve read another article about Stumbleupon traffic in which some folks claim it improves search engine rankings. This is simply untrue.
Keep in mind that I’m talking about traffic. Traffic and search engine rankings are two different things. Someone visiting your website will NOT increase your search engine rankings, period. Search engines have no idea that your site has been visited, they are not psychic. Likewise, people StumblingUpon your website will do NOTHING to increase search engine rankings.

Search engine rankings are driven by many factors, but traffic isn’t one of them. The only way that a visit can contribute towards your search engine ranking, is IF that visitor has their own website or blog and IF that visitor is so impressed with your page that he/she adds a link to your page on their site.

Now, given the bounce rate mentioned above, the probability of this happening is ridiculously remote. Getting people to add links to you is not easy, and it usually takes a heck of a lot more work on your part than passively just letting traffic come in. So just like traffic might lead to new customers - IF the traffic source is full of people looking for what you’re selling - and that’s a big huge IF - traffic might, if all the stars align, lead to a new link, it’s a very, very remote possibility, and I wouldn’t count on it to improve your rankings a nit.

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 23rd, 2007 at 2:03 pm and is filed under the Getting Traffic category. Read other Aldebaran Website Design Blog articles by returning to main blog page. Need a blog added to your website? Click here to read about blog installation services or click here to contact Aldebaran Web Design. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.