Getting ‘StumbledUpon’ – the viral results
The StumbleUpon effect
Two weeks ago our blog post “Top 14 power words” got ‘StumbledUpon‘. Immediately this bookmark attracted a good inflow of website visitors.
Soon after the same post was book marked on Mixx, Propeller, etc.
In total this book marking created about 1,000 additional visits in one day upon our website.
During the rest of the week, the website received significant additional visitors, but that number decreased exponentially.
Every now and then a new load of visitors arrives in “small groups” over a short amount of time.
Book marking reason
We have no idea why this post was ‘StumbledUpon’, whereas other posts, that are more interesting ones in our humble opinion, only get a couple of dozen visitors instead of 2,000+ in 2 weeks.
Observations:
1. Lots of traffic. However traffic is not lead generation.
2. After the first bookmark has become ‘popular’, others will bookmark the same post on another book marking website.
3. Most people just visit the blog post: Every visit and every page visit is registered by LEADSExplorer.
4. Only a small group of people visited other pages of the blog or the website – mainly website visitors from companies: information provided by the LEADSExplorer webservice.
5. After a few days, other people will link the blog post in their “best of the week” posts.
6. 98% are residential Internet surfers. Only about 3% of the visitors are people using corporate or company Internet connection: we know this, as we use LEADSExplorer on the website.
7. Most visitors are from USA – still French and German people do use StumbleUpon or one of the other book marking sites.
8. Visitors seem to read the entire blog post. The time spent by every visitor on the single blog post page is registered by LEADSExplorer.
9. People do read, leave and then come back to read the same post over again. Sometimes even up to 3 times. Don’t they read attentively?
Website visitor discovery, filtering and analysis
For every single website visitor the origin is presented and in case of a company: the company name. This makes it possible to differentiate between residential and corporate website visitors. This allows us knowing the reach of the blog post in our market (B2B).
We didn’t have to wade through those 1000+ visitors as LEADSExplorer provides filtering of:
- The visit data by number of pages
- Minimum amount of time
- Number of returning visits.
Thus making the discovery and analysis of visitors feasible and effective.
The viral results:
- Getting bookmarked has increased the number of visitors significantly over a short amount of time (2 weeks).
- This increase of visitors has brought an increase in ranking on Alexa: from about #950,000 to #650,000. We already decreased back to #690,000.
- Additionally, it seems that Google has ranked the website higher for several and different search results.
- The Technorati authority increased from 1 to 5 and the rank went up from 1,5mio to 1.1mio
- We didn’t receive any additional inquiry related or thanks to the blog post.
- We didn’t notice any additional conversion, no immediate lead generation as it is B2B, thus getting bookmarked won’t bring additional revenue directly.
- Thanks to the number of visitors there will be an increase of branding.
Conclusion:
- Getting bookmarked boosts traffic, not leads
- Getting bookmarked has nice side effects like increase in rankings: SERP on Google, Alexa, Technorati.
- Probably branding and awareness has been increased.
- If you want to know and measure the effect of getting bookmarked, having a web service defining who is visiting your website is a must have in B2B. Else you don’t know anything about your visitors, the effect and the value.
What were your experiences or results of getting bookmarked?
this is exactly what I have experienced with a post on my blog. A lot of traffic, but not to responsive.
The significant time on page was due to the fact that a lot of stumbledupon users use the service to promote their blogs, and look forward to quality content to thumb up to make their rating within StumbledUpon higher, building the credit for promotion of their own content.
Thank you for this useful statistics.
[...] a web service LEADSExplorer mainly uses this blog (and hope every blog post gets bookmarked or copied for further distribution), Twitter (added Tweetmeme buttons to the blog) and [...]