Traffic Behavior From StumbleUpon Stumbles

What Type Of Traffic Can You Expect From StumbleUpon?

The type of traffic you stand a chance at getting from StumbleUpon is quite different from traffic you would get from a search engine like Google - which of course is more specific and offers very targeted traffic that matches the end users search query with the content on your site. Duh, right?

StumbleUpon traffic is different in a few lights, mainly because it’s not very targeted, and it gives you a chance at gaining visits from people who may not have regularly came across your site in their normal, every day search routine. Also, because the sites are so loosely tagged among the community, you may have someone that specializes in plumbing come across your site about carpentry just because you share ‘similar’ interests. The way I just described SU traffic sounds pretty crappy, huh? Well, I’m here to tell you, it’s not.

StumbleUpon Traffic, as well as traffic from other popular social bookmarking sites such as Digg and Delicious have their benefits. Perhaps the most important one is that it’s rather easy to get traffic flowing from these sites, and best of all – free!

Here are some observations of StumbleUpon traffic from experts in the field of social media, and myself. Some good, some not so desirable, but hey, we’ll take them!

Very low Adsense or contextual ad click through rate - Users who are actually “stumbling” through pages are often searching for an eye catching design or article that grabs their attention. If you don’t have this, and have more Adsense ads than content, then don’t expect many clicks, even if you got lucky and have thousands of visitors coming in. Not only that, but I’ve seen circumstances where someone gets 5k plus visitors from SU, which gave them 48 Adsense clicks, and Adsense only counted 4 of them. Yeah, they were pissed.

Good web design - is paramount for StumbleUpon visitors. The average time spent on a web page can be less than 10 seconds. As I said above, SU users only tend to stop when something really catches their eye. This isn’t always true, and there are exceptions to the rule, but if your site or blog looks junky and amateurish, then don’t expect average page times to be high.

Diverse demographic. Visitors from StumbleUpon come from many countries from all over the world, this can play out well if you are marketing something worldwide. If you have a more local or national product, this obviously doesn’t help anything besides your stat counter. Also, obviously an article about the Queen of England would probably bring in more UK Stumblers than anywhere else…

Resulting RSS subscribers are shady, but not bad. I’ve had traffic spikes from SU that resulted in feed count numbers being boosted quite a bit. Depending on the blog, I’ve seen them go right back down the next day, and on the other hand, some blogs that get big spikes of traffic and resulting RSS boosts actually bring long term subscribers. This will vary from blog to blog, but again, I’ll take the boost whenever I can get it.

Not all websites are of equal design - Video, Humor, Web 2.0 and crazy websites do extremely well with SU. Having said that, those kinds of sites seem to do well with any type of social bookmarking situation. Keep this in mind the next time you launch a new site and plan on getting traffic from SU or the others.

Traffic is definitely long-term. Large traffic spikes can bring an initial rush of traffic (which is very addictive), and weeks or even months later, you’ll still see remnants of the initial surge. This is awesome, in my opinion, and the more posts you have that become popular, the more long term traffic you’ll receive from sites like StumbleUpon.