Hi Arvind,
I totally understand your frustration here, but I wanted to clear something up about bounce rate: the tracking method used by many web tracking platforms, including Google Analytics, calculates bounce rate as the percentage of single-page visits, or visits in which a person left a site from the entrance (or landing) page. As you know, StumbleUpon takes you from one page to another that's likely on a different domain. So even if a StumbleUpon user stumbles to your page and spends, say, 20 minutes engaging with your content, once they stumble to the next page, this visit will still count as a bounce because the user didn't click to another page within one domain. Similarly, the time on site metric registers as zero unless the user clicks a link on the landing page, even if that user spends several minutes (or more) enjoying content on that page. So basically, Google Analytics doesn't give you the full picture.
What StumbleUpon is particularly good at is remembering and keeping track of "loyalty statistics" - in other words, if someone thumbs up content, we'll likely recommend content from that same domain in the future, ensuring that you have a high quality, loyal following. You can check the loyalty of your visitors in Analytics (
http://su.pr/1SaR7O).
It might help you to actually run a test with StumbleUpon Paid Discovery (www.stumbleupon.com/pd), our marketing platform, which can show you some of these stats, like time on site, whether people share your page via other platforms, and more. Feel free to email advertisers@stumbleupon.com with the subject line "Paid Discovery Test" and mention this blog post, and we'll give you $25 credit to try us out. You can test out different targeting techniques and see which gets you the best return. In fact, many publishers and advertisers have told us that their time on site metrics with StumbleUpon have far exceeded that of other marketing platforms (
http://su.pr/1uFMqW). If this still doesn't work out for you, please let us know!
Thanks!
Katie Gray
Social Media Marketing Manager, StumbleUpon