StumbleUpon experiment – Low quality traffic
Social bookmarking is one of the best methods today to increase our blog usability and its popularity. i.e. to make our blog known all around the blogosphere. And there are several social bookmarking sites which can produce from a few to thousands of visitors at once, all depending on the number of positive reviews or votes it received. I decided to give some try with each of the social bookmarking sites and see what kind of traffic i am getting. The first one i tried is StumbleUpon. Is it some good quality traffic that comments in my blog? Or the visitor is just come-and-go one which eats up bandwidth!
For those who don’t exactly know what SU is, it is a social bookmarking website available in browser as a plugin, and when a page is liked by us, we can just click on the “I like it!” thumbs-up and you may see some traffic flowing in if its your own site. The plugin is available for firefox and internet explorer. You can get traffic for free, or can try their paid traffic service @ 5c per click. The below post i am doing is related just to the free service of SU.
So here was my small experiment -
This post of mine was stumbled and reviewed with tags by just 2 people – Stumbleupon google search tool
It generated 4,400 views till now, just within 2 days but none of them gave any perfect visitors who would actually comment in my blog, or at least stay in my blog for some time to explore the blog. And this number is still just increasing with around 30-40 visitors per hour.
Stumbleupon in my view -
A free traffic exchange site where we can get thousands of visitors instantly but as in automatic traffic generator, the visitor visits the site and just leaves. So there is no valuable traffic through Stumbleupon! For the post which i tested, it had about 180 visitors who actually stayed for longer time and then browsed to some other pages of my blog. The other 4000+ visitors just came and went within a minute.
It would just be helpful for those who want to see some great changes in their visitor count, but those who want to make wonders with their blogs should just forget stumbleupon and move on to try the other things and social bookmarking sites.
Btw i had started my blog with traffic from stumbleupon, being happy that i am getting visitors in a fast rate, but realise that its not that traffic what i am expecting.
Waste of bandwidth and every one is just helping out stumbleupon grow rather than making their websites gain traffic in reality.
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Well Chetan,
I don’t agree with you. If you target the right category and your post is viral or attractive to a user (who is just having fun stumbling), they do convert.
Jim Karter’s last blog post..Few Discount Coupons
As i already said, i would get some non-agreeing comments
I always target right categories, but wonder why no quality traffic flows in.
I did see somewhere that people were experienceing high bounce rates with digg. Although their conclusion was that they could have found the post very helpful and it answered all their questions?!?!
Phil Benwell’s last blog post..The basic search engine optimisation guide – Part 4
Agreed there. The traffic from there isnt much worth. They either browse 2 pages or leave from the same page they came.
Mayank Rocks’s last blog post..A Fruit A Day Keeps Diseases Away
I agree. I advertise with SU and get about 180 views per day with maybe one review. Yes, it’s great for traffic, but the bounce rate is usually high.
Chetan, I tend to differ here in opinion.
It’s all about the niche that you try to target on SU. Some niches like music, celebs and photography does extremely well with SU as we know.
I feel the Stumble users are looking for some catchy stuff when they hit to “Stumble” button, If they don’t find that they just move on. I have seen conversions from Stumble traffic also.
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You are absolutely, 110% correct – the quality of “visitors” Stumblebum sends is pure unadulterated crap. I know from personal experience both from paid advertising with them and from tagging site pages w/ SU.
SU users seemingly blind to content, haphazardly click their toolbar’s Stumble button visiting websites at speeds up to 10 sites a minute. Zero to minimal prequalified visitors is the norm – and you can forget about any conversions – it’s a celebration of mindlessness.
Their tagging system is a complete joke – you can only see 7 sites for any given tag – sometimes none. Sites disappear only to be replaced by those maybe a year older without even any reviews. Searching SU is even worse – results contain a mishmash of irrelevant nothingness.
Stumblebutt has a really good thing going – for them that is – they sell advertising for a nickel a click – and with millions of users they’re making a killing. Only problem though is that advertisers get zip in return for their money – only elevated uniques in the site stats – no sales, no comments, no clicks, no conversions whatsoever.
Essentially, Stumbleblunder sucks. There are far more productive and measurable means by which to garner traffic – read – visitors that have conversion potential.
Just had alot of traffic from stumble upon and I was quite impressed with the results, average stay was over 1 minute and bounce rate in the 35% range.
Phil Benwell’s last blog post..Weekend Humor
Well it depends on your site. If you have a good quality content then visitors from SU will not leave your site
Hussein’s last blog post..Removing NoFollow-Free Plugin
I got an email delivery of this post today.. haha weird.
Mayank Rocks’s last blog post..Forum Administration Tips For Newbies – Part 1
3 days after the post was made???
Really weird.
Here’s another good article on Bringing More Traffic from StumbleUpon :-
http://www.expertearning.com/internet-marketing/bringing-more-traffic-from-stumbleupon/
Many of the visitors are quality for me … and yes some are not too.
my other site theme on entertainment gets good traffic from SU and saw some increment in the earnings from Ads too.
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Never knew that it can be automatic too.
But SU is good way of getting some traffic. I have some good success with my strong profile
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nice debate guys . . . now i am getting to know something about ‘Stumble upon’ 2 days back i used to think that it is a search engine
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There is one time that my traffic from the stumbleupon is higher than the google. That was a lucky shot i guess. Hope my site will be stumbled again..
david cheong’s last blog post..Lucky Winner in Contest (March 2008)
While I agree that the quality of visitors from SU is quite low, at least they are visiting… I mean it’s better to have some people reading your posts versus no one. And I think it will start to build branding. Sort of like that McDonald’s commercial you see on television for the 20th time. When people see your site in stumbles multiple times, they start to become more aware of what your blog is about and might even subscribe to it the second or third time around. Can’t look at it as a total loss- any visitor is good for me!
i came from stumble and i stayed and comment on ur blog; i will click in ur ads too
but being serious – traffic is good, if u dont need to think about bandwith limitation, there is nothing better and stumble is great tool for it; even if the visitors are just accidental, the probability of getting valuable visitors will always be bigger than with low traffic
I still have to read up on StumbleUpon and Technorati to make the best use out of them. I’m sure there are ways to make them valuable. Keep trying, and keep searching for answers!
It’s well known that the traffic is low quality and worthless for affiliates or any other type of conversion. SU users will invariably leave your site regardless of the quality of the content because they are not *looking* for anything in particular. They are simply having sites spoon fed to them.
Also, the thing that particularly puzzles me is that although SU is essentially a traffic swapping site, they frequently ban accounts that engage in traffic swapping.