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StumbleUpon Visitors Not Identified by Analytics

Posted: February 7, 2007

There has been quite a buzz lately about Stumbleupon traffic. I’ve been testing Wordpress and other analytics programsÂ and have found that many of them don’t count Stumbleupon visitors correctly.

Here’s a quick look at plugins, server side analytics, and java tracking:

Wordpress Plugins:
- Slimstats plugin thinks the traffic is internally referred, so doesn’t count the visitor.
- Shortstats thinks the same think as slimstats.
- Counterize II doesn’t seem to count it as anything.
- Popstats gets it right, but doesn’t have aggregate views into referring domains.

Server Side Analytics Programs:Â
- AwStats thinks it’s a website referral and counts the link the traffic came from; however, it doesn’t group all of the traffic together unless you do a special sort in the referring source. For some reason, I see over 50 different referring stumbleupon URLs. No other program sees this many variations.Â
  - Stats show 914 stumbleupon visitors.
- Webalizer gets it correct for the most part.
  - Stats show 1102 stumbleupon visitors.
- Raw log files
  - Stats show 1153 stumbleupon visitors.

Java Based Analytics Programs:
- Google Analytics counts them similar to feedburner.
  - Stats show 373 stumbleupon visitors.
- Feedburner analytics is missing quite a few of the referrals.
  - Stats show 364 stumbleupon visitors.

Log File Parser
- ClickTracks gets it correct
  - Stats show 1152 stumbleupon visitors.

It seems that a stumbleupon.com URL looks like:
http://www.stumbleupon.com/refer.php?url=http%3A//www.bgtheory.com

The redirect that stumbleupon.com is preforming confuses every WordPress stat plugin I’ve tried.

Dixon wrote a great post at WebmasterWorld about java vs server side tracking a while ago, which is a worthwhile read about the advantages and disadvantages of each.

If you rely just on java, or just on server side stats (or Wordpress stat plugins) - you might be misinterpreting how much traffic Stumbleupon can bring to your website.

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Related Information:

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Written by Brad Geddes aka eWhisper · Filed Under Blog

Comments

14 Responses to “StumbleUpon Visitors Not Identified by Analytics”

StumbleUpon Buzz » bgtheory.com on February 7th, 2007 8:46 pm

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Derick on February 8th, 2007 10:50 am

I’ve been playing around a little with StumbleUpon lately. I have Counterize II installed and it correctly tracks my SU visitors. It shows the full SU URL in the referrers section and counts the visit in the overall stats section. In fact, one of my posts that was recently Stumbled has moved into my top posts section and the SU URL shows as a top referrer.
Brad Geddes aka eWhisper on February 8th, 2007 11:00 am

Derrick,

that’s interesting - makes me wonder if there’s something else going on with the WP plugins.

I redid some of the DBs today, and slimstats now shows 25 SU visitors.

As Counterize II only shows the top 20 referring URLs, it could be it’s catching some of these visitors - but not all of them so isn’t moving it to the top 20 referral list.
Derick on February 8th, 2007 2:45 pm

Yeah… that could be. I should have mentioned originally that I can never find all of the incoming links at the bottom of Counterize II to match with the number of hits it says the SU visitors are generating, either. So I think you’re right… something is missing somewhere.

But you know… none of these plugins show the same numbers anyway. And none of them show the same numbers as, say, Google Analytics. So it makes me wonder how accurate they are… period.
Brad Geddes aka eWhisper on February 8th, 2007 3:38 pm

Derick,

That’s why I found it interesting that the java numbers are similar, the WP plugin numbers, and the server side numbers are similar when grouped.

Analytic numbers will almost never match. However, when comparing them in groups, its interesting to see how different types of tracking preform against other types of tracking. In this instance java vs server side vs WP DB.
Derick on February 9th, 2007 9:44 am

I guess the best way to get a broad understanding of your site’s traffic is to pool all of the information together and look for similarities, trends, etc.

Maybe StumbleUpon should implement its own tracking system and show how many times certain reviews have led to stumbles (unless they already do and I just haven’t been able to find it).
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