Comments on: StumbleUpon Ads: Take Your Money & Run?

By: Jason Counts

Jason Counts — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 00:46:58 +0000

I ran a test campaign..very small, but noticed the bounce rate in google analytics was ridiculous. Almost seems as if StumbleUpon is a glorified traffic exchange with a dash of web 2.0 & social networking, at least thats my initial impression from the bounce rate I was getting.

Don’t get me wrong, there are some things I like about Stumbleupon… just not too sure if I’ll advertise on it again. I’d probably test a different niche or 2 before I decided to personally write them off as a viable advertising channel for the results I was trying to achieve.

By: Brendan Picha

Brendan Picha — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 15:24:30 +0000

@All First let me say it’s great to see people I know and respect comment here. @Tim: Brilliant explanation which makes total sense. I would think it would do SU well to at least mention this (in plain sight) to it’s paying advertisers.@Brian: I don’t use WP’s stats feature so I don’t have any data to share from this.

By: Brian Wallace

Brian Wallace — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 13:36:21 +0000

Hey Brendan,

I’d be curious to see what WP stats are showing for the same time period as well.

By: Tim Nash

Tim Nash — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 10:29:46 +0000

It is down to a number of things,
1) Stumbleupon counts a visit when it places a site for a person to view in their queue.
2)Your Analytics counts only when a useragent that has javascript enabled turns up on your account.

This means if someone has your site in their queue but doesn’t actually visit, clicking to fast, closing their session. Then Stumbleupon has still counted it but they didn’t actually get there. Meanwhile your analytics program maybe missing 5% of visits because they have chosen to block tracking or disabled javascript at all. The combination means that you can see wild discrepancies between what SU thought it has sent and what you see, for SU to fix this they would need to shut of precaching on su toolbar and make more calls to the toolbar which would slow the process down for their users something that would have a negative effect on all stumblers

By: Glen Allsopp

Glen Allsopp — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 07:52:09 +0000

A friend suggested that this discrepancy might be due to fast clicking where people are hammering the SU button so it’s recorded as a page view on SU’s end but not within analytics.

Exactly my first thoughts, especially if analytics tracking is at the bottom of the page

By: SEO Diva

SEO Diva — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 21:52:49 +0000

I ran a campaign a few months ago and noticed the same thing.