Proof that social bookmarking works - May 29th, 2007
Last week I wrote an article about how to increase traffic to your personal StumbleUpon account with the eventual hope of increasing traffic to the sites you want people to look at. I knew that social bookmarking could be a good way to drive new traffic to your site and would be a good part of any Internet marketing campaign.
The next day Darren posted an article on the biggest Internet mistakes ever, which was a good article in itself. A couple of us in the office liked this article and so posted a little review to StumbleUpon, but purely because we liked the article. This then went onto our StumbleUpon friends which increased the traffic slightly, some of the people who read the article clicked on “i like this” which added to the amount of people being shown the article when they stumbled.
In the end we saw a massive increase in the amount of traffic coming to our site within a 3 day period. At its peak we were receiving 850% more traffic than we normal do, with StumbleUpon making up around 80% of the total traffic to the site. Starting off from 3 people liking this article the end result was a lot more than we expected.
The bad news?
The trouble is, even with all this traffic is that our page goals and bounce rates didn’t change much. There was a small increase in the amount of time that people spent on the site, but does this lack of an increase in page goals mean that the StumbleUpon traffic is rubbish? I don’t think it is. An increase in the amount of visitors can only be a good thing, at the very least we are spreading the JustSearch brand.
Phil
SEO Programmer
