Social Marketing And The Stumble Lie
StumbleUpon is a very popular social marketing tool. However you need to be careful when assessing the results from any Stumbling activities.
To call it a Stumble lie is probably stretching it a bit. In fact it isn’t actually a Stumble problem; it is a problem with Java Scripts and certain analytical programs. For instance, if you use Google Analytics to assess your marketing activities then your figures will lie. The following quote from StumbleUpon should make the problem fairly clear.
[source]Analytics packages like Google Analytics, Urchin, Webtrends, etc., use javascript to track traffic. You may see a difference between the traffic reported by these services and the traffic reported by StumbleUpon.
A large portion of our Firefox users have added the NoScript add-on to their browser. This is one of the top-10 most popular extensions for Firefox. This extension blocks any javascript calls that the user doesn’t approve of. Blocking javascript causes Urchin, Google Analytics, Webtrends, etc to not work. These tracking services never see the traffic because NoScipt blocks it.
You may see a larger difference in reported traffic than with other advertising services because StumbleUpon has a much higher proportion of Firefox users — and in particular, a much larger proportion of people who use browser extensions — than a typical audience. In essence, StumbleUpon’s early-adopter user-base is much more privacy and security conscious than the typical internet user, and they block tracking services as a result.
As can be seen, if a majority of StumbleUpon users are also Firefox users then their visits and subsequent activities may not show up in your analytics. You may need to find a non Java Script tracking utility to gather accurate results for your social marketing activities.
It should be pointed out that this problem does not just affect StumbleUpon. All web and social marketing campaigns are affected. Any visitor that uses Firefox with the NoScript add-on will not register in your analytics. It is true what they say, you cannot trust statistics.
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