Traffic Growth #5 – What Value In StumbleUpon Visitors?

It’s been a busy week, with the move to WordPress, a complete redesign, and consistent posting. It offers a good comparison to last week’s analysis of a low activity week. Traffic from both social media sites and general flow is up, and a landmark on Sunday with the first 1,000 visitor day, but bounce rates are an issue.

Today in addition to examining the general traffic increase I’m going to have a look at the bounce rate statistics in a little more detail. I’ll also outline the blog commenting strategy for next week.

General traffic increase

The majority of traffic still comes from visitors submitting articles to social media sites. General flow, barring any social media, is around 40 unique visitors a day. That’s demonstrating continued growth, and around 300 visitors a week on that basis seems pretty decent.

It’ll be interesting to see the long term impact on Google searches of the move to WordPress (given I didn’t fully update the permalinks). About 100 visitors a week come through searches at the moment, usually for some of the tutorial pages.

One source of visitors I’m not sure how to analyse is the direct traffic. Where does this come from? I guess that there aren’t over 100 people a week who simply type my domain name into their address bar. Does it also refer to people clicking on links in emails, as that seems a more reasonable source of traffic?

StumbleUpon – are the numbers adding value?

The ‘Lost On The Internet’ post on Friday has drawn in a lot of traffic via StumbleUpon this week. But it led me to look closer on the statistics of those visitors.

There are a couple of obvious trends I see in relation to Stumbles.

• Significant traffic incease
• Corresponding reduction in average time/visit
• Really high bounce rates

The average StumbleUpon visitors stay a few seconds on the site and then leave having visited one page. That’s exactly how I use the StumbleUpon toolbar, clicking the Stumble! button quickly unless a site particularly grabs my interest immediately.

Dragging the bounce rate above 90% doesn’t look good though. The increased visitor numbers mean that the site can carry that bounce more effectively (and obviously some people stopped to ‘thumbs up’ the site to sustain the StumbleUpon traffic longer). But if the majority of StumbleUpon visitors leave a site almost immediately, how much genuine value is there in being Stumbled?

You can see from the stats that the site doesn’t have great bounce rates at the best of times. I’ll do some research in this area and have a look at methods I can use to reduce bounce rates in general. Any advice gratefully received.

The blog commenting strategy

I’ve mentioned in the past my desire to follow the advice in ‘Do You Have A Blog Commenting Strategy?‘, most particularly the section on creating an early comment hit list.

I’d found developing a list was quite tough. A wanted to find a good mix of blogs to target that were regularly updated and that I felt I would want to comment on most posts. Right now I want to get into the habit of commenting before I start looking at some of the wider aspects of the commenting strategy.

This weeks list is:

• I’m Not Actually A Geek
• Marketing Mystic
• Alexander van Elsas’s Weblog
• Regular Geek
• Colin Walker
• chrisbrogan.com
• The Social Creature
• Broadcasting Brain
• Online Marketing Banter
• One Man’s Blog

We’ll see how an attempt to comment regularly and early impacts traffic towards Fog of Eternity.

Related Links

I created a new category Traffic Growth series category, so all the posts are now available there.