The Stumble Effect – Good or Bad?
I absolutely love Stumble Upon. I mean it’s such a simple yet wonderful concept. Press a button and you are wisked away to some new and exciting website. It’s the magical wand of the web world. I wish I had such a button when I was a kid, press a button and get wisked away into some magical fantasyland full of fun and adventure… ok, I’ll be honest, I wish I had one now. Who doesn’t love adventuring into the unknown?
But that is me as an internet user. As a web designer and site owner, I have some reservations about Stumble.
Digg is great. It lets people find the really great content that they want. It’s broken into categories and you get a little preview of it before you click through. With Stumble, not so much. You are in fact, stumbling around the web.
Well, being a college student and having done some stumbling in the real world, I have found that I rarely find what I am looking for by stumbling. In fact, it’s why we invented things like indexs in books, catalog systems in libraries and search engines on the web. At the end of the day, you might find something interesting by just stumbling around but your never going to find something you are looking for.
So, when I putting together a quick strategy for a client on how best to approach sites like Stumble (and Digg, Facebook, etc…) I told her to forget Stumble.
Sure if you give your site a thumbs up you are guaranteed a good 200 hits that day. And if one or two other people give it a thumbs up then you might get 300 that day or another couple hundred the day after that.
But when you check your Google Analytics that night your average time on site will have dropped to about 5 seconds and your bounce rate will be nearly 100%.
Some will say, so what? Maybe one of those people subscribed to my blog or bought my product and isn’t that worth it? Well it is if you never intend to do anything interesting with your site. What I have realized is that Stumble Upon is a one time deal. You rarely get many people to give you a thumbs up and if you do it’s typically on an image or media item that is not even on your site.
So, save your entry into Stumble upon until you have something people will like. Or better yet, try actually doing what Stumble Upon is designed for and let your users give you a thumbs up.
My point is this, there is not strategy to Stumble Upon except to… you know… have good, fun and interesting content.
March 31st, 2009 at 2:24 pm
Finally someone who can write a good blog ! I loved your post and will be telling others about it. Subscribing to your RSS feed now. Thanks
April 17th, 2009 at 1:01 pm
By choosing SU friends who are truly interested in your topic and niche you can increase the time spent on your site and the number of comments left. In the long run you will build valuable traffic and connections.
May 30th, 2009 at 4:39 pm
Google definitely rewards sites with low bounce rates, and for that reason alone, I don’t recommend Stumble Upon. It’s all about the targetted traffic.
August 25th, 2009 at 1:24 pm
Very good point. I used to think that stumble upon is the best traffic source. But now seems like it will make your page rank worse if people don’t like your content.