Early value of Blog Rush traffic
Early value of Blog Rush traffic
Like so many others I too have jumped on the Blog Rush bandwagon, and like all the rest I have been waiting for my Blog Rush stats to become available. Rather than trying to explan it I’ll let the following screen shots show you the details and then I’ll get into the point I wish to make.
In the first image we see some information about my credits earned via direct traffic and my “affiliate” network. In the second image we see how often a link to A Blog about Nothing has been displayed on other Blog Rush users widgets, and we see how often those links are clicked. My click through rate (CTR) for Blog Rush translates to roughly 1 click per 1,000 impressions which of course isn’t very impressive. As I improve my headline writing abilities I hope to sucker entice more people to click on the links and visit my blog. Which leads me to the point of all of this.
I use Google Analytics to help me keep track of traffic on my site. It allows me to see where it came from, where it has gone too, how long it stays, where it leaves from, where it enters, and a bunch of other stats I’ve not taken the time to learn much about. Long and short of it is this. Per Google Analytics Blog Rush has sent me 3 visits (GA updates once a day) with an average on site time of 21 seconds, and a bounce rate of 66.67%. The bounce rate is simply the percentage of visitors to my site who land on one page and leave the site. Remember this is strictly traffic refered from Blog Rush I am talking about right now.
Now we’ll look at traffic generated by Stumble Upon. Average time on site is 1 minute 27 seconds with a bounce rate of 31.85%. Stumble Upon traffic is notoriously fickle with stumblers often fleeing from sites within a split second of landing on it. Plus it is not targetted at least not to the degree that Blog Rush claims to be. Next let’s take a quick look at my average traffic from all sources. Average time on site is 1 minute 35 seconds with a bounce rate of 35.79%.
What does this tell me. A few things actually. First of all it tells me that I need to work on my headlines as is evidenced by the dismal CTR of about 1 per 1000 impressions. Second it tells me that Blog Rush traffic isn’t likely to stick around. Which is a little surprising to me since my Stumble Upon traffic does seem to stick around a bit and even visit other parts of the blog.
In closing I realize it is way to early to give a fair assesment of Blog Rush, but I find myself agreeing with WP Press who says Blog Rush users have been wamboozled. Only time will tell, but I’m having trouble seeing the value in this little widget. For that matter even Darren of Problogger seems to have some concerns regarding the dismal CTR. According to him out of 70,000 impressions he’s only getting 35 clicks and Darren knows how to write good headlines and how to write a damn good blog.
I will have to agree
wamboozled sounds like a good word.
This is really nothing new..just all talk and good advertising.
They Just built upon the Widget Box concept.
Time will tell what the deal is…
Pro Blogger has his stuff together and knows what he is talking about, if this is not doing anything for him wamboozled is the word!
Great site, I love visiting to see what you are saying!
Very interesting insight. I was amazed at the number of people who promoted blog rush in such a very short time.
As looked around at different blogs, I did not come accross many that did not have the widget.
I just wanted to encourage you to keep writing excellent content like you did in this post.
Don’t worry about the headlines…they will come. Thanks so much for your assessment of Blog Rush. Keep up the good work.
Danny D – Thanks for stopping by and taking time to comment! Yep, I’m in agreement. This seems to have been all a very slick marketing campaign. Like I said I’ll be giving it a couple of weeks to be fair but I don’t expect much to come of it. For the big blogs I’m sure it will do great, but for the nobodies like myself I have serious doubts.
Albert – Thank you very much I appreciate that. It seems that everyone has jumped on the blog rush bandwagon. It will be interesting to see how many jump right back off it in the coming days and weeks.
Traffic exchange sites, over all, impress me little. It’s usually worthless traffic. At one time I was getting 200-300 hits a day from Blogmad. But 99% of them only spent the required the 25 seconds in my blog to satisfy the 1 to 1 surf ratio. Pretty much useless traffic when any exchange site is involved.
I bet you in time blogrush will have a little ad on the bottom of the widget for using their services =).
it could be to much blogger have been joined with BlogRush, so the traffic also split on small volume. We still wait until October 1, when the credit use to display your feed, CTR maybe more high.
1 click per 1000 impressions wow this is worthless …especially the fact that there is a ton of Blogs that signed up … this is not a rush at all….They still need to work about this s system…
Yea I agree this just doesn’t seem to be all it’s hyped to be.
http://bloggerforlife.com/blogrush-does-it-really-work/#comments
I’ve not had much success with return traffic from StumbleUpon, and I suspect that my niche will not do well with Blogrush either, at least for a while. Keep us posted on how it is going though!
Happily – Yep. For some reason I (and many others) had high hopes for Blog Rush. Like you said it’s just another link exchange.
David – They’ll certainly be doing something.
“How will BlogRush make money with this? Will there be an ad bar added to the widget? Will it contain somekind of AdSense ads?â€
The company will primarily make money from the “left-over†blog title spaces across the network. When all the math is calculated on all 10 generations of referrals, it will leave 10% of the spaces (i.e. 5 spaces per widget, so 1 out of every two loads of the entire widget [10 total spaces] leaves 1 empty.) We will most likely add something so users can purchase more syndication credits if they choose to. The inventory that can be sold will be from these left-over spaces. – Source
Pogung177 – Maybe I misunderstand credits, but isn’t it just meant to give you more impressions? If people don’t click on the thousands of impressions we get now what would entice them to click on more? The issue is that the CTR is horrid.
Blacksky – No it isn’t a rush by any stretch of the imagination. I suppose if it was only me having this problem I’d just have to shut up, but I’ve not come across any blogs that at this point have anything good to say about this thing. I think everyone is more or less willing to give it a few weeks and see how things go, but no one seems to be holding out much hope.
Richard – I think part of the problem is how much they hyped the product before it was released. Of course in marketing that’s normal, but not on a product that simply isn’t ready to do what the hype claims it will do.
Jeremy – Yeah return traffic from Stumble Upon is difficult. Off the top of my head I believe that I have something like 96% new visitors from Stumble Upon. Your niche is definitely a tough one to get a lot of traffic in, but certainly worth the effort.
Great insight. Seems like rather than clicking the blog displayed by this widget, a surfer is likely to click Adsense Ad.
Udz – I’m not ready to put the entire Blog Rush idea to bed just yet. I’ll give it another 2 or 3 weeks and see how things are looking at that point. They’ve begun to address some concerns that many bloggers seem to have so that’s certainly a step in the right direction.