I was listening in on Office Hours on WebmasterRadio.fm today and the question came up of how to find the referrer URL from StumbleUpon to your site. When you look at Google Analytics the referrer shows up as refer.php or toolbar. This won’t take you to the page that refers to your URL, similar to how digg would do something like /movies/some-movie-specific-url. It is a little bit of a process to figuring this out and also keeping in mind that a large percentage of StumbleUpon users view new pages via the Stumble button. This will show you how to track the referrals from the StumbleUpon page linked to your URL.
Google Analytics shows you the base analytics data, but again, refer.php and toolbar
As mentioned, you can’t click through from the refer.php to view the actual reviewed page. That just takes you to a generic page that tells you your site is on StumbleUpon. Not much help is it?
If you want to check the page that links to you from StumbleUpon you are going to need to make sure that you have the StumbleUpon toolbar. If you don’t, download it and install it. Once you’ve done that, you’ll notice there is a little “comment” bubble, which takes you to a page to review a URL.
The Review Button is highlighted in red in the top of the image:
That will take you to the page with the StumbleUpon reviews to the URL that you want to track. Once you get there, you will notice your URL stringle after in the address bar:
StumbleUpon URL String:
You’ll also notice the title of the page, who submitted the page, stumbles, and reviews for the page you are tracking.
StumbleUpon Page with Reviews:
Again, thats where you are going to find anything that is tied to the page/URL you are attempting to track, but, you have to keep in mind that there are still users that view your site with the Stumble Button in the toolbar. That is basically how StumbleUpon works, you click the button, a new site comes up, and so on.
Stumble Toolbar button highlighted in red:
Remember: If you are trying to view the reviews/stumbles and page your URL is linked to from StumbleUpon, then click the review button, but, its important to note the toolbar clicks. Typically the way pages are browsed to via StumbleUpon is through the toolbar.
I hope this answers the question for the person that asked the question on Office Hours with Vanessa Fox. If not definitely leave a comment and we’ll figure it out from there! Also, If anyone has more detail or would like to add on to this, please leave a comment and I can even update the post, etc.
Some Notes from Twitter:
– Matt Inman recommended Mint Website Analytics which tracks Viral / Linkbait
– Joost De Valk also has some Mint Peppers (Mint Plugins)
Hey Tony,
Connect with me on SU> I’m DennisGnl
See you next week.
DG
Tony,
Check out http://mcc.hitslink.com
it’s free for 30 days and BLOWS a full version of urchin away, much less a free stripped down one.
the stumble referrs go back to exact point.
Stumble’s new UI re: where I view the communities feedback (reviews and number of thumbs up) sucks!
I used to be able to see every stumble thumbs up…it would list about 50 and i could view all the great peeps who liked my work! Also i could check it daily to see new stumble peeps liking my work.
They got rid of that for the most part now. Reviews are now prominently seen then on the right side you a small list of those who liked your site! BOO stumble BOO
Why not just do this?
http://analytics.blogspot.com/2009/02/event-tracking-best-practices.html
Jaan, that would allow you track events on your site. But, assuming that someone is on StumbleUpon and comes across your site, I’m not sure I understand how that would help track the referrer? In fact, I’m pretty sure that you would not be able to do that using that type of “event tracking.” I could be wrong though, so, if I am, please do let me know!
Great article Tony, I’ll be checking that out tonight when I get home from work 😉
Just for completeness I think it needs to be mentioned that from that page in GA above you can drill down into “Landing Pages” and see which specific pages on your site got the traffic. Most people probably already know this, but I’m sure someone is reading this article and wondering how much traffic did what page get on my site. This becomes especially important if multiple pages of content were stumbled.
Can you do the same with all other Social bookmakers?
You can do this by capturing the referring URL using filters in GA. Once you have this user defined value you can breakdown the stumbleupon referrer by this value to show the full referring URLs. Here’s a post outlining the steps to set it up: http://www.reubenyau.com/google-analytics-hack-obtaining-full-referring-url/
Lastly, you can do this out of the box with Omniture SiteCatalyst.