Stumble Upon User Ate My Hamster

No not really, just trying to drag the fickle Stumblers into this blog post to read about the consequences of their website channel surfing.

For the uninitiated, Stumble Upon is a social networking application where people stumble around the internet as if they were channel surfing in the ad break with the aim of finding new and interesting web sites.  If they like the site they give it a thumbs up or else they give it the dreaded thumbs down.  The social aspect is that the newly stumbled sites can be shared with a group of friends.

It's a great site and it can generate a ton of traffic for blogs such as this, but the problem from a click fraud perspective is the profile of a Stumbler is exactly the same as a paid to read click fraud farm.

What we see on our analytics from a Stumbler is a person landing on our site, spending a fraction of a second before moving on.  If someone is carrying out a click fraud investigation, it is hard work to see past these valid Stumbler profiles and not judge them to be click farms clicking on paid ads and then moving onto the next site to carry on their fraud.

The way to get past this problem is to limit which referrer you are analyzing from.  Stumble Upon is quite clearly the source, drill down on you ppc provider and ignore all Stumble data.  This should help pin point if your are the victim of click fraud.

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(AF) Click fraud software from Click Tracks