A lot of people complain that the traffic from Stumbleupon is too hit and run, that the people do not click on ads, do not subscribe to RSS, do not bookmark. I wanted to test exactly how much Stumbleupon traffic is worth.
I first noticed Stumbleupon a year ago when it started to show in my logs. I have since used it extensively to drive traffic to my website and although few visitors took actions other than to exit I did feel there were benefits but had no hard data.
So I took a domain that I owned for two years but had done nothing with. Put up a WordPress blog, chose a niche which I knew had a rabid following and started to throw up content. I then stumbled the content which was then stumbled by others.
The test is very simple, throw Stumbleupon traffic at a website or blog and see what happens. I have kept the test as pure as possible with no external links pointing to the site other than happens organically.
February 10,206 uniques with 25,593 page views
March to date has had 6,501 uniques with 23,372 page views.
The site has no advertising or distractions other than the posts.
The site received 40 links, of which 2 were from blogs the rest were Stumbleupon pages.
I made 20 posts in February, 23 pages are cached by Google, previous to this none were.
So far 38 unique searches have come from search engines, mainly MSN.
Conclusions so far:
The only benefit is the 23 pages being cached, cannot say that this is directly because of the Stumbles.
No real benefit in setting up a made for stumbleupon site.
I will keep the experiment running and start to place things like an email opt in box, an adsense banner, a link to an ebook and will blog the results later.
I notice this blog, Cornwallseo.com has been stumbled a number of times and I wonder if there are any regular readers that found the blog via a Stumble.