Come for the Ride…

Our experience with Stumbling for traffic was met with moderate failure.

Our initial stumble and efforts to get a group to stumble the website into the rotation was met with a spike in traffic.  However, the way stumbling works is pretty similar to how drunks stumble into various things.  Even though they stumble into your door, sometimes you wonder if you really want them there.

The web browsers that stumbled to the website was untargeted. We received on average close to 100%  bounce rate as well as a session time of 1-3 seconds.  Whoop-dee-do.

Subsequent stumbling of the website have failed to spark additional traffic even though technically we should be seeing more as a result - I’m not really sure how their algorithms work but it definitely does not seem to be working correctly.

Overall - I would recommend focusing your efforts elsewhere for qualified traffic as stumblers aren’t up to par.  The service seems to be great for bots or marketers who are looking to promote something. Usually if I’m browsing something on the web, I’m surfing with a purpose.  Even for people with way too much time on their hands, I fail to see why they would stumble from site to site just to be disappointed.

On a separate note, as a webmaster who installed the StumbleUpon toolbar, I have noticed I would occasionally tap on the Stumble button by accident - which leads to confusion, anger, and then me clicking the back button.  I would hate to think users who I worked hard to get are coming to my website by accident, and then leaving before ever trying to figure out what’s actually on the page.

Bottom line - would not recommend.

Social bookmarking sites are known to generate short bursts of traffic.  Whether these referrals are qualified or not, the debate is still up in the air.  For my third test, I will try to get our website seen by the crowd at StumbleUpon.  Once we get some data, I will report back on the results.