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.