Hi, I built a stats tracking script over a year ago for a site of mine. It worked fine. I done it so I could easily search for sites that referred traffic to mine. With the results of the stats it would tell me the total average pageviews I was receiving from each visitor from any site referer from any timeframe that I would decided it to show me. It would then tell me the path that each visitor took on my site which was great, it also told me how many seconds it took for the visitor to go from one page to the other so I know how long they spent on each page. This all worked out great, but I had noticed something very strange with stumbles stats. It seemed to always produce 2 pageviews in a 0 second time frame on the exact same page as if someone would land on my site and then refresh the browser asap. That happen to about 60% - 90% of the uniques that you would get from stumble. Now I have just been stumbled again, but this time I am using Google Analytics instead of my script and I am starting to think that this sort of thing where 2 pageviews is created from just that first visit of the page is also happening with Analytics. After looking at the bounce rate, it also suggests that this is occuring as the bounce rate is around 30% or lower which shows my findings as I said 2 pageviews were created for every 60% - 90% of the uniques from Stumbleupon and a lot of people have suggested and what I also think happens is that people stumble and land on a page, look at it and then stumble again where they will move on without browsing your website. What do you think of this and have you had any experience. I thought that I would mention this just incase some people think that they are having more pageviews than what they actually are having and also think they have a better bounce rate when infact it's most probably really horrible and the stats are probably actually wrong. How you understand what I am saying here. This is an example of what I was seeing. Google index 0 sec, game/1.html 15 sec, game/3.html 1 min 2 sec,... Stumble index 0 sec, index 0 sec Stumble index 0 sec, index 0 sec, game/3.html 15 sec Stumble game/3.html 0 sec, game/3.html 0 sec Etc... There not my total stats, but that is the sort of thing I was seeing happen very often with stumble is that it would always show 2 pageviews for the same page in a 0 second time frame. I have a feeling this may be happening with Analytics which is maybe causing the bounce rate to be very low. Does anybody know whether the bounce rate is comes into play when the visitor refreshes the page or when the visitor moves onto another page of the site? If this is true then you Analytics is most likely to be showing a bounce rate of 20% - 30% when infact it may be more around the 50% - 90% mark.
From personal experience, about 90%+ of the time, I never browse more than 1 page from a stumble site. I keep my mouse pointer on the stumble button and click as soon as I get a quick glance at the site. I would not be surprised at all if the bounce rate was 50-90%.
In my opinion StumbleUpon is just an Alexa. Good only if you wanna look at other websites. Definitely not for marketing.
In statcounter I've noticed that a stumbledupon is always 2 or 3 'hits' in quick succession per ip. I've always assumed it's something to do with the way stumbleupon loads/redirects to pages.
I believe it's something to do with the loading/redirects aswell. It's quite annoying as it puts your stats right of if you are working on a per page view. Say you were earning on CPM ads and you were earning $5 cpm and you wanted to roughly now how many pageviews per visitor you were having so that you could roughly work out how much you were earning per visitor, then you would normally spend a little less per visitor on advertising so that you could bring in some nice profit, but with stats like that, you are likely to make a loss and would wonder why as it would not match up with your stats. It's because the stats are inaccurate. I think this happens with not only stumbleupon, it also happens with a few other random sites on the web most probably.