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!
September 12th, 2008 at 9:53 am
Very interesting post. I really enjoyed it a lot!! Two thumbs up =)
September 13th, 2008 at 7:43 pm
Thumbs Up-ed. Crap now I feel obligated to uphold the stumble upon name… damn it… *clicks on tags to the right*
September 14th, 2008 at 3:07 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!
September 14th, 2008 at 3:10 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
October 20th, 2008 at 5:50 am
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.