My blog got Stumbled Upon!
Posted on February 28th, 2007 in Blog) by Lars-Christian |
My post yesterday, “10 reasons why I’m glad I switched to a Mac!” was submitted by someone (thanks, whoever you are) to StumbleUpon. I have never actually used StumbleUpon myself, but from what I’ve seen and heard it’s a sort of social bookmarking feature which lets people reccomend things they read, and it then get picked up by others looking for something similar.
One of the reasons I could never be bothered to try it out myself is that from what I can tell, it requires you to install a plugin for your browser, which is something I’m not really fond of. A lot of people use the service however, and I thought it would be interesting to see the details of how my it affected my stats.
On a normal day, according to AwStats, I receive around 120-something visitors on average. These visitors rack up around 1000 pageviews in total, which definately seems to be slightly overrated, but I’ll get back to that later. Yesterday when my article was picked up by the StumbleUpon service, 1200 people found their way to my blog, accumulating over 6300 pageviews. Not too bad! This actually matches up quite well with my Google Analytics stats like unique visitors do for the most part, but when it comes to pageviews these two stats-trackers seem to disagree. Analytics concistently reports a much lower number of pageviews compared to AwStats, and I believe Google is actually the most reliable party here. The individual pageviews for yesterday’s post match up quite well with the visitor stats, but none of the other pages shot up significantly in terms of views. Sounds odd seeing how high the number of pageviews supposedly was.
All in all, it does indeed seem that the debated myth about people discovering a blog through social bookmarking reading and leaving stands pretty strong. Take for instance the stats for my feed subscriptions. Despite the thousand something people who visited yesterday, only two new people subscribed. Additionally, the comments weren’t exactly flooded. I’m not complaining however! I’m glad that people are even reading what I have to say, and if someone finds it interesting enough to come back at a later time, well then that makes me even happier!
As a small curiosity I’ll add that if you look closer at the left menu, you can see that I added a couple of links. Those very few blogs are the ones that I read on a regular basis, and I would definately reccomend that you check them out. They are for the most part particularly interesting to other bloggers.
Grats on the Stumble, but unfortunately I’ve found that they don’t tend to stick as well either. I actually just wrote a short post that talks about Stumble traffic a bit:
http://www.netbusinessblog.com/2007/02/26/analyzing-page-views-per-visitor-by-source/
Thanks, and way ahead of you, already read that article
It’s a nice one, and I must agree on your points that the best way to create sustainable traffic over time is to diversify. Search engine traffic for instance is all good and well, but you don’t want to be left completely out in the cold by being penalized by Google for some mistake you didn’t even knew you made.
I was also Stumbledupon once. It was amazing to see the amount of traffic that came to my blog in such a short time. Using Stumble upon is somewhat like using the back button on your browser. It allows surfers to browse through pages quickly. This is my opinion, but I think that what catches most Stumblers attention are sites with a lot of interactive multimedia. I was Stumbling once and an intensely interactive site stopped me cold.
I’d have to agree, rapid browsing does not make for lingering readers. Probably, only one in one hundred actually stop to read your entries.
I think that the page view to unique visitor ratio has to do with the fact that each unique visitor’s browser makes multiple requests to a single page, say for instance, to fetch each image that’s on the page, or to fetch the favicon. I usually see a separate request for those. I’ll have to take a look at Google Analytics again. For some reason it is no longer tracking my blog.
Thanks for the post. It reminded me that I have to post one as well.
Jose
Congrats on getting Stumbled Upon as well Jose, it sure does wonders for traffic. It seems I actually got a second surge as well, with almost as many visitors as the first time, a few days later.
As for what you’re saying about visits/pageviews, I think you’re actually confusing pageviews with hits. Like I’ve understood it, pageviews are pages loaded, and hits are total elements loaded. Of course my little Share It script counts as a page, so that might explain something in my case.
Thanks Lars,
I use Firestats for tracking my statistics, and it breaks down the traffic in pages viewed and unique visitors. My page views average 3 times the number of unique visitors. That’s roughly how I look at it. But thanks for the info. I’ll take it in consideration as I examine my statistics in greater detail.
Jose
I have just recently discovered SU but loving every minutes of it. I’m really amazed by it’s ability to learn and tune to the pages that you are interest the most but lettin gyou select “I like it” or “I don’t like it”.
Although I’m not sure if the sayting that they will replace google is entirely true. To me they are totally entirely different products. SU is actually great for surfing leisurely but google is probably more accurate if you’re sure what you want to find.
Great article!