StumbleUpon just sent 900x the usual traffic for 2 days

[Colm]

Back in January after reading this thread I submitted our game dev blog to stumbleupon.com to see if we could get a few new visitors that way. A small burst of people were directed to the site (10-20 / day) which then trickled down to 0-3 / day over the next few months. That's 1.5 visits / day on average over those 3.5 months; not inspiring but OK for a new blog like ours.


Until Wednesday, when stumbleupon decided to send us over 1,500 visits. Thursday saw 1,243 visits.


What's caused this? I mean it's nice, but also very random to get such a massive burst of traffic. On Tuesday I did submit our latest post to stumbleupon, but all the traffic is pointing to the blog homepage rather than that post... so it's the original submission from January that is getting stumbled I think!

(these graphs are only showing stumbleupon referrals btw)

[Mochek]

I actually had the same thing happen with my site Solitaire Paradise and again I have no idea why. I submitted ages before it got the Stumble Upon bump.

[cliffski]

it probably made it to the front page. But it's not as good as it sounds. I track everything with google analytics, and SU traffic is appallingly low-conversion rate. The average time on site for a SU visitor is very very low.

[Sol_HSA]

I had the same, with my logic sim. Unfortunately I did not have ads on the page then.. might have made a full dollar! =)

As a longer-term result, a bunch of electronics sites posted articles about it right afterwards, and those drove traffic for a longer timespan.

[Maupin]

Periodically that happens with Stumbleupon. For whatever reason (probably someone new gave your site a thumbs up) they sometimes push your site to the top of the list and for a period of time it's recommended to everyone interested in your category.

My experiences are the same as Cliff. Stumbleupon users are bored and looking for a quick bit of entertainment - a small flash game, etc. If your site can't entertain them in five seconds they click Stumble! again.

[Colm]

Agreed that stumbleupon visitors are amongst the most likely to immediately stumble onwards to a new site. Those 2.8k visits had a 70% bounce rate (leaving after only viewing the home page), but that still leaves about 800 visitors who had a look around, which is great for a new blog like ours.

[Acord]

The same holds true for slashdot - lots of traffic, no real interest. Some of the traffic was nothing but troll.

[Colm]

Well it only lasted those 2 days. Back to 0 stumblers/day after that! I guess it's just the randomity (sic) of stumbleupon.

Hard to tell if anyone subscribed to our RSS feed from that 3k really. Shame feedburner / rss can't provide more accurate stats.

[puddinlover]

Ya I'm finding stumbleupon traffic to be almost useless. I tried my game on stumbleupon and got over 500 visits from stumbleupon and 0 conversions

I just added my programming blog to stumbleupon too but I'm getting almost no traffic. same with digg.

[Acord]

Somebody said something about background noise in another post, and I think as time goes on the net gets more and more full of it. It's difficult to even think of a useful way to hit target markets in a viral manner, since there's such a fine line between good marketing and spam.

I'm wondering - there are several affiliate deals going on here, and there's some definite new talent. Maybe some sort of free indie game initiative of older/non-selling stuff in order to get people to sign up for a mailing list? RSS feeds and mailing lists seem to have a good impact/conversion rate compared to other methods - at least from reading other people's stuff.