slickhog.com

To some, traffic is traffic, one page view is equal to another page view. The more you have, the better. That’s absolutely right if you’re simply counting the number of visits to your site, but various sources of traffic, will provide extremely different return in terms of click-through rate (CTR) and your ad revenue.

One could only expect that if your traffic goes up, your earnings from ads will increase in the same proportion. This is not the case, according to my experience. Take StumbleUpon, for example, once every few weeks one of my pages gets tagged by one of their members and as a result I get an influx of traffic from them. I would say, they bring in on average 9,000 monthly visitors to my site. That number is based on 1-2 articles being tagged per month.

If you have you used StumbleUpon before, then you will know how it works and what to expect as a blog owner. For those of you not familiar with it, here’s a brief explanation. The site provides links to other web sites which were tagged by the users, the more tags or votes, the higher the ranking. What sets StumbleUpon apart from the rest, is a tool bar at the top of the screen that allows you to jump to, more or less, randomly chosen sites at the click of a button. Many times you may not even know the address of the site you are visiting, if you don’t like it, just “click” and you’ll be presented with a new web site, and so on.

StumbleUpon is great for two things, 1) finding web sites you would otherwise not run into, and 2) killing time

This leads me to the point of this post. If “Stumbled Upon”, your blog will get tons of traffic but don’t expect too much from it. Sure, you may probably gets a few visitors that will add your site to their favorites, but the vast majority will simply move on to the next site.

What StumbleUpon traffic will do to you:

Benefits

1. Number of pageviews will go up
2. Small fraction of the traffic may like your site and turn into repeat visitors
3. Exposure

Disadvantages

1. Number of pages per visit will go down (these people look at one page and move on to another site)
2. Click through rate (CTR) will go down dramatically (in my case, it’s about one tenth of my average CTR)
3. Your Bounce Rate will go up
4. Bandwidth usage (although if you’re hosting your blog with a decent host, you should be getting more than enough of monthly bandwidth)

Having said that, I think StumbleUpon is a great concept for both their users and blog owners, but you must keep in mind that the traffic generated by these folks will get your exposure, but is of low quality in terms of ad revenue.

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