By bounce, I am referring to bounce rate. A bounce is recorded when a visitor views only one page of your site during the visit. As someone who runs a blog, I strive to make my content coherent (ie. my blog contains a lot of programming and technology content) so that it appeals to a certain audience. A good indicator of whether my blog is coherent is if people view more than one page per visit on average, or if I have a low bounce rate.
People usually find my blog through search, and so they land directly on a post (instead of the front page). Likewise, when my blog get Stumbled, the landing page is always a post. When visitors finish reading that post, ideally they’d take a look around to find more of the same content. With that in mind, would the bounce rate of visitors from Google and StumbleUpon be the same? Here is my referral data from the last two months (July 1st – Sept 11th):
As you can see, the bounce rate from StumbleUpon visitors is very low compared to visitors from my other top referrals.
My conclusion (well, it’s more or less an assumption, but an educated one) is that the StumbleUpon Interests selection works very well to channel interested readers to your content. It’s not a bad bet that users who go through the entire process of signing up to StumbleUpon, installing the tool bar, and setting up their interests must really be passionate about the selected topics.
That or they have a lot of time to kill, which, admittedly, is something that StumbleUpon also does very well.
The moral of the story? Tag your Stumbles wisely!
P.S. If you have a blog which gets Stumbled often, post some of your findings on your bounce rate!
Very interesting post. I really enjoyed it a lot!! Two thumbs up =)
Comment by Hairstyle — September 12, 2008 @ 9:53 am
Thumbs Up-ed. Crap now I feel obligated to uphold the stumble upon name… damn it… *clicks on tags to the right*
Comment by Emily — September 13, 2008 @ 7:43 pm
Good article, and as Emily said, one now feels like I must read some more articles!
StumbleUpon is simply an amazing way of reading through hours of normal boredom…
Thumbs up!
Comment by Alejandro U. Alvarez — September 14, 2008 @ 3:07 pm
Thanks for all the thumbs-up and praise. StumbleUpon is a fantastic tool for discovering new things, but I’d like to find out how to make it work better for both web surfers and content publishers.
Will post more findings in the future.
Thanks again guys
Comment by David Chan — September 14, 2008 @ 3:10 pm
I think the primary reason that SU has such a low bounce rate is because it backlinks to the individual article which will engage the user to say “Hey, what else did this person write?”, whereas the organic searches or direct referrals will like lead them to the aggregated homepage. Since the aggregated homepage already answers this question, there is no need to venture out without cause.
A good way to keep a low bounce rate is to offer only a segment of the entire article with “read more” link.
Comment by Adam — October 20, 2008 @ 5:50 am
A good way to keep a low bounce rate is to offer only a segment of the entire article with “read more” link.
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But then wouldn’t the page within the Read More link be the one tagged?
Comment by Corey — April 9, 2009 @ 4:34 pm
Google Analytics inaccurately reports bounce rate and page views from most StumbleUpon traffic (mostly from the Firefox toolbar).
There’s a pretty good theory discussed here:
http://blog.rebeccamurphey.com/2008/01/03/suspicious-stumbleupon-bounce-rates/
Basically, most Stumbleupon traffic will at least be reported as no bounce, and 2 page views (both of the same page).
Comment by peaceoutside.org — May 20, 2009 @ 11:44 pm
Maybe this is true for blogs, but it certainly has not been true of one of my websites (http://home.comcast.net/~leavesdance/rainbarrels/construction.html). I periodically get tons of stumbleupon visitors, but their bounce rate is very much higher, than folks visiting from a search engine or a referrer’s link.
Comment by becca — December 15, 2009 @ 2:49 am