Suspicious StumbleUpon Bounce Rates?
I've been promoting some of my blog posts by submitting them to StumbleUpon, and it's been generating a fair bit of traffic -- my post "How I Learned CSS" has done especially well. I've been watching my site using Google Analytics, and I've noticed that visitors from StumbleUpon have a substantially lower bounce rate than, say, visitors from dzone. So I think, "yay, StumbleUpon" and start submitting anything interesting I write to there. But in poking around in my Google Analytics a bit more, I've also noticed that, on pages that I've promoted through SU, I'm seeing strange navigation patterns: for "How I Learned CSS," 40% of visits to the page came from the page itself (and, as it logically follows, 40% of next pages were the page itself). The page was viewed a total of 4,700 times, but a little more than 2,800 of those pageviews were unique. Since bounce rate basically measures whether a new arrival went to another page before leaving the site, I'm not sure it shouldn't count as a bounce if the second page the user visits is the same as the one they were already on.
10 comments
The toolbar preloads pages before you stumble them to make loading faster when you hit the stumble button
Check your history when you're logged in to StumbleUpon, you'll see a few sites on the top that you haven't visited yet, there the pre-visited pages
Anyway, I will now go and look at the rest of your site to help your real bounce rates! It looks intersting!
I really enjoy SU and find it's a nice way to store my bookmarks but using it for marketing purposes doesn't really lead to much... A while back, we did a little informal case study on which social media sites actually lead to real business (rather than just traffic) and SU was pretty low on the list.
