What is a bounce rate and where do we use it?

Is StumbleUpon Paid Discovery a good use of marketing spend?

• We have tried a campaign and have noticed a minimum engagement and a high bounce rate. I am still trying to understand the SEO benefits. We are targeting a business audience and use link baits such as "Top Something" that link to original and relevant articles. Would be interested to share experience with other B2B sites about SU but also Digg and Reddit.

• Answer:

  I certainly won't go on and on about how my favorite StumbleUpon product is the best thing since sliced bread (even though as its product manager, I probably should!).  But I will say this about it: our consumer product (stumbling from one site to another with the click of a button) really throws traditional analytics packages for a loop.  These packages aren't designed to properly measure the kind of traffic we send.  Allow me to explain.  One of our 15M+ users clicks the "Stumble!" button, and we recommend a page to them.  Every so often, it's content that is sponsored (still relevant topically and carefully reviewed for quality), which is what Paid Discovery is all about.  The user isn't navigating the web by clicking links here and there, they are effectively inside our app, and the primary way to get more great content they like is to rate the page they were on and hit the "Stumble!" button again.  So when they encounter your page, love it, spend a few minutes enjoying it, give it a thumbs up in their StumbleUpon toolbar, and click the "Stumble!" button again to be equally delighted, this is what your analytics package sees: new visitor landed on your page with a referer of StumbleUpon, then zero seconds later, the user bounces.  Why zero seconds? Because packages l like Google Analytics measure the time spent on a page by subtracting the timestamps of two consecutive page views.  In other words, unless the user clicks to a second page on your site, there is no way for GA to measure how much time was spent on the first page, and the time spent for that page view is recorded as zero.  That brings down the average time spent, and inflates the bounce rate, even though the user enjoyed the page, thumbed it up, and shared it with friends. This is a lot of the reason why we built Paid Discovery to begin with starting late last year, and launching this past March.  We are actually able to measure time spent on individual pages. How? Both the persistent StumbleUpon toolbar that the user is using and our server logs of stumble-to-stumble times can help us calculate how much time our users spent on pages they stumbled.  This "time spent" stat is available to those advertisers who take advantage of our Standard and Premium campaign plans.  And the numbers we see for engagement -- things like time spent, thumbs-up rate, sharing -- are quite encouraging across the board. Since Paid Discovery's strength is best proven out to build brand and awareness (unlike paid search, which is more about direct response and purchase conversion), you should aim to find ways to measure engagement and awareness.  We've provided some with the platform, but I'm always curious to hear what others out there are doing!