This morning I was checking out my stats in Google Analytics, and noticed that I’ve been getting a little traffic coming from StumbleUpon. Great stuff! But I wanted to know which article(s) were generating the buzz; unfortunately I had no idea how to find out. I tried the obvious: I tried searching StumbeUpon itself for my domain name, but that didn’t get me anywhere.
Now, I do happen to know how to find a specific page in Stumbleupon: simply navigate to http://www.stumbleupon.com/url/ and append the url of the page you’re looking for (thanks to Terence Chang for the tip). This can be quite a handy way of finding out who submitted your article, what they said about it, what category it was put in, etc. But still, the thought of repeating this for each of my posts to try and find which one(s) had been stumbled didn’t fill me with great excitement. So I decided to try to find the answer elsewhere.
Google Analytics to the rescue
Whilst I’m aware there’s quite a lot of depth to the information presented by Analytics, I tend to use it fairly superficially – generally just to get an idea of traffic volume, where it’s coming from, and what my most popular content is. Occasionally I drill down a little bit to see which keywords are sending me traffic from search engines (OK, Google), but not much more than that.
But I had an inkling this may be the way to find what I was looking for, and sure enough, after just a few minutes of poking around I found the answer. Here’s how to do it:
- In Analytics, navigate to Traffic Sources > Referring Sources
- Select StumbleUpon from the list of referring sites
- Select Landing Page from the Dimension drop-down list, and voila! you should now see a list of pages that have received traffic from the referring site, along with numbers of visits to each page, and some other information.
You can obviously apply this same process to any referring site, but I think it’s most useful in the context of social bookmarking, because
- You don’t get any pingbacks from these sites
- Often social “links” do not show up in search engines either
I hope you found this useful – I certainly did. If you did too, why not give it a Stumble and share it around? Also, you may wish to check out my article on how to drive traffic to your site using StumbleUpon.
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Using Google Analytics to get this information, as opposed to getting it from StumbleUpon’s site areas, might be a faster way to get the data. This is another one of Google’s services that more than meets the desires of the user.