rmurphey

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.

I'm not seeing this pattern with pages I don't promote on SU, which makes me curious. SU is clearly driving a ton of traffic to my site; it's just not clear that the traffic is actually resulting in the remarkably low bounce rate that Google Analytics shows. If I took out the 40% of people whose next page was the page they were already on, I'm left with not even 1% of people who went to another, different page on the site before leaving -- and suddenly dzone is looking good again. I did a Google search and didn't come up with much except this, which discusses the importance of bounce rate, and this, which suggests using StumbleUpon to reduce your bounce rate. I'm curious whether anyone else is seeing this, and whether it's actually related to StumbleUpon, Google Analytics, or something else. If I had to guess, I'd imagine that this is a result of people using the StumbleUpon toolbar (since it's not happening in all cases), and maybe the toolbar is pre-visiting the page on the user's behalf to make sure it still exists? Update: See the comments and a more in-depth discussion.

Blog Monitoring 101

I've helped set up a couple of corporate blogs, and -- for corporate bloggers especially -- it can take a little bit of doing to understand your place in the great blog-o-sphere. There is lots of advice out there about how to win friends and influence people with your blog, and I don't purport to know better than everything that's already been written. However, I do have one thing to say to people venturing into the blog waters for the first time: Google is your friend.

Google Blogsearch and Google Reader

To be an active participant in the blogosphere, you need to do more than talk -- you also need to listen. These two tools together provide great insight into what people are saying about topics you care about.

• Use Google blogsearch to search for terms you care about. Get the URL for the Google Blogsearch feed for each search term (in the left-hand nav of the Google blogsearch page) and add it to Google Reader.
• See what shows up; pay special attention to contributors who are cited by other contributors.
• Comment (meaningfully, not gratuitously!) on posts that relate to what you blog about, and include a link back to your blog. If you have a post that's directly related to what someone is writing about, include a link to it.

Google Analytics

I recommend Google Analytics because it provides whole-site metrics, in addition to page-by-page metrics. It's important to understand how visitors arrive at the site as a whole, because visitors can arrive at the same content in countless different ways.

• Set up a Google Analytics account and add the tracking code to your blog per the instructions.
• Watch Traffic Sources > Overview to see how traffic arrives at your blog.
• Watch Traffic Sources > Referring Sites to see which sites are sending traffic to your blog. Consider adding frequent referrers to your blogroll or list of links.
• Watch Content > Overview to see which posts are doing particularly well or poorly.
• If you want to make the most of your blogging efforts, monthly metrics reports won't cut it. You'll need to be paying regular attention to analytics information -- especially to referring sites -- to pounce on opportunities and to put out fires.