The Effects of Stumbleupon
Mon, 20 August, 2007 – 9:46 am
Yesterday I was doing some spring cleaning on my blogs. Removing unused plugins, shifting things around a little, fixing some CSS issues in Microsoft Internet Explorer etc. I happened to notice a few new faces on the MyBlogLog widget I have in the sidebar of my blogs. You get used to the same faces showing up of your regular visitors, with the occasional new icon every so often, but 3 or 4 in a row gets you wondering what's going on! I did a quick check in my latest visitors but couldn't see any new inbound links. I logged into MyBlogLog and did a double take on the stats for my Tech blog for the day. Almost 100 readers and 200 page views. Usually it says around 10 readers and 50-75 page views!nnI got distracted (someone has to cook dinner afterall!) and returned back a couple of hours later. Refreshed my stats again and it had shot up to 150 readers and almost 500 page views. Something wierd was going on that's for sure. A late phonecall off a friend took me away from the computer again, so an hour later I returned, refreshed my stats, 1000+ page views. I then opened up my WordPress stats to see an insane graph as below:nn
nnThis is for the last 10 days. You can easily see the difference that yesterday has had. Looking at my referrers for the day, Stumbleupon was at the top for two pages. The first is for my Learn PHP category, the second for a specific post on PHP again, the For Loop. In total I've had XXX visitors thanks to the person who first stumbled the category (I believe the second stumble is from someone who stumbled the first). I've also had 2 further stumbles on the same site, one for the main domain and the other for my WordPress category. I've seen the effects of Stumbleupon before but never on this scale and this quick! I guess it depends on the subject and PHP is a fairly popular subject for a lot of people.nnI can't really give accurate counts as they all differ, probably because all my counters besides AWStats uses JavaScript plus some span across all sections of this domain and some are split up. However going by MyBlogLog, which counts for the whole domain, I get the figures 1203 page views and 599 readers. A major increase on usual activity!nnThis is more a post on marketing and traffic, just to show that with the right subject and a stumble, it can all escalate. Sure it's a temporary spike, although I am still getting visitors through from Stumbleupon. However hopefully I've turned some of those stumblers into repeat visitors. As for monetisation, at present I only have a small Google AdSense ad below each post. I think that site is more of a passion and a place to blog than anything else. However, according to MyBlogLog's click tagging, I did have 6 clicks on my AdSense yesterday. According to Google I had no clicks at all 
nnHowever, I think the visitor spike is good enough to be happy about 
nnPS. Thanks to the people who first stumbled me!
I posted my StumbleUpon results over the weekend. I was able to reproduce the results with a second much older and larger site. Seems like we get 100 visits right off the bat. There may be a way to increase that number, but I am still figuring that one out. As for the quality of visitors. I would say they were like people who flip through TV channels. Not much action.nnBeachBum
By BeachBum on Mon, 20 August, 2007
Well I ran a check through all 4 pages that had been stumbled and a few others had marked it as a favourite too, plus a couple of del.icio.us adds too so it's the best stumble I've had so far. Another of our sites had a major stumble, not as many visits as yesterday though, but that continued with a handful each day too. However looking through the stats it seems that a few stumblers had a look around so not all just came and went
By Sarah on Mon, 20 August, 2007
I've never had a reaction like that from stumble, but I wouldn't mind if I did.
I'm curious though, did you see a significant increase in subscribers(return readers) from the stumble or just a lot of traffic? My experience has been that most stumblers don't necessarily turn into readers.
By thatedeguy on Mon, 20 August, 2007
Definitely a lot of traffic. I just checked AWStats (had to wait for it to update) and that reads at 700 extra visitors compared to average, and 1300+ page views made by visitors referred from Stumbleupon, so on average almost 2 pages were viewed per visitor. Knowing at least 50-75% of these people will have come and gone, then that page view average can be considered higher at around 4-5 pages viewed per visit.nnI'd like to think it gained some extra feed subscribers however my feedburner stats go up and down like a yo-yo so I doubt I'd notice unless it suddenly soared! I would imagine that you really need a good 'hook' to get more stumblers to take notice and not just 'pass through'.
By Sarah on Mon, 20 August, 2007
Something that has a big effect on how fast and how often it goes into rotation is the person who stumbled it. If they are a long-time member of the service and a regular rater/stumbler, that is better that someone who is brand new.
By sara on Tue, 21 August, 2007
Congrats Sarah. Yeah Stumbleupon is a fun bit of traffic – because most of the time you can't see it coming – unlike Digg. On top of that, most of the Stumbleupon readers are already optimized to your niche, so you've got a higher chance of getting more subscribers. Would be nice to see if you've picked up more subs.
By Adnan on Tue, 21 August, 2007
Congrats on the big burst of traffic. I've had a couple articles stumbled, but have yet to see any results like that! Are you seeing any staying power from the traffic StumbleUpon is sending you? Spike in RSS readers, etc?nnI wrote a post about why "social networking traffic sucks" if you want to check it out.
By Deron Sizemore on Tue, 21 August, 2007
Thanks for the replies guys
Sara thanks for the info, I didn't think about credibility and how that could affect it, also thanks for the stumble which I noticed 
nnAdnan and Deron, as I mentioned before, the feedburner stats aren't showing much different but then again I don't find them very accurate anyhow. I'm guessing it was just a major influx of traffic and perhaps a few new regulars but we'll see as the week/month continues 
My erratic posting doesn't help 
By Sarah on Tue, 21 August, 2007
Nice boost in traffic. I didn't know that Stumbleupon can send such traffic. I thought Digg only have to send huge traffic causing servers to crash :pnIt seems Stumbleupon is much more popular in nontech people.
By Dansko on Tue, 11 September, 2007
Thanks Dansko. I think if it's the right subject then StumbleUpon can hit quite hard. My server coped perfectly fine which I was glad about and I'm sure my host was too! I only happened to notice the rise in traffic through MyBlogLog stats. The subject matter was on PHP and I think it was stumbled by an active stumbler. As Sara mentioned, the more trust and respect that stumbler has the more people will come because of them. My WordPress section also got stumbled on the same day but didn't receive half as many visitors through.
By Sarah on Tue, 11 September, 2007