Social site StumbleUpon is a great way to drive traffic to your site. If you recall, from the end of year stats for this blog last year, StumbleUpon drove almost a third of total traffic.

For those who don’t know what StumbleUpon is, here’s a quick overview. It’s a social media site based on a toolbar. You install the toolbar, and can thumb up or thumb down any website you encounter. This plays into the functionality of the Stumble button on the toolbar. Pressing this button pulls up a random page that someone else has thumbed up (in a category that you’ve said that you’re interested in.) Stumbling can enable you to find useful, useless, funny, horrible pages that you would most likely never find. The more thumbs up a page receives, the more often it’s shown - the fewer thumbs, the less often.

So - what can StumbleUpon do for your site? Here’s an example from my blog - SearchEngineTigers. In the process of researching Social Search sites for my SES NY presentation, I came across an amusing Mark Spitzer image on Facebook. Taking a screenshot of this, I threw it up and thumbed it up to see how well it would do.

As you can see, on that first day it hit ~450 visitors, the next day close to 900 -  before it started to tail off. A week later, it started moving back up again…why? Because the people that saw it at that time started thumbing it up again.

StumbleUpon is a social network because you do have the ability to have a friends list, communicate with each other, send pages directly to each other, and filter to only show pages from all of your friends - or even only one friend. But, it’s the random factor that gives a user the edge over other social networks. As long as the content is compelling enough, it’ll get shown and thumbed up, which will take it to the next level.

What you do need to do though, in order to make your StumbleUpon a success is to actively thumb up / thumb down / comment / submit content. The more you’re involved in the community, the better the chance your page will get pushed out for others to stumble it. Oh, and don’t just stumble your own website.  You should only stumble one page on your site for about every 20 that you submit. This can be the difference between 5k visitors and 2.

Based on some testing that we’ve done here, it appears that your activity in certain categories can impact how many times an article can be shown. What we did was to place a post in an uncommon category.  We then had some experienced stumblers, with very active accounts thumb up the post. There was hardly any movement in the traffic. When people who actively stumble in that category thumbed it up, the needle moved.

As for time limits on the stumble factor? We’ve seen a post that was stumbled, go back down to the normal level of traffic for a while, then a few weeks later it suddenly spikes again, as someone else stumbles over it and thumbs it up.

All in all, StumbleUpon is a great traffic generating tool for your site, as long as it’s targeted correctly. Speaking of which, next Monday  - I’ll talk about paid advertising in StumbleUpon, and highlight some of the interesting issues that we’ve found with that.

Filed under: Analytics, Social Marketing on Monday, March 31st, 2008 by Simon Heseltine |
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