I was listening in on Office Hours on WebmasterRadio.fm today and the question came up of how to find the referrer URL from StumbleUpon to your site. When you look at Google Analytics the referrer shows up as refer.php or toolbar. This won’t take you to the page that refers to your URL, similar to how digg would do something like /movies/some-movie-specific-url. It is a little bit of a process to figuring this out and also keeping in mind that a large percentage of StumbleUpon users view new pages via the Stumble button. This will show you how to track the referrals from the StumbleUpon page linked to your URL.

Google Analytics shows you the base analytics data, but again, refer.php and toolbar are shown:

As mentioned, you can’t click through from the refer.php to view the actual reviewed page. That just takes you to a generic page that tells you your site is on StumbleUpon. Not much help is it?

If you want to check the page that links to you from StumbleUpon you are going to need to make sure that you have the StumbleUpon toolbar. If you don’t, download it and install it. Once you’ve done that, you’ll notice there is a little “comment” bubble, which takes you to a page to review a URL.

The Review Button is highlighted in red in the top of the image:

That will take you to the page with the StumbleUpon reviews to the URL that you want to track. Once you get there, you will notice your URL stringle after in the address bar:

StumbleUpon URL String:

You’ll also notice the title of the page, who submitted the page, stumbles, and reviews for the page you are tracking.

StumbleUpon Page with Reviews:

Again, thats where you are going to find anything that is tied to the page/URL you are attempting to track, but, you have to keep in mind that there are still users that view your site with the Stumble Button in the toolbar. That is basically how StumbleUpon works, you click the button, a new site comes up, and so on.

Stumble Toolbar button highlighted in red:

Remember: If you are trying to view the reviews/stumbles and page your URL is linked to from StumbleUpon, then click the review button, but, its important to note the toolbar clicks. Typically the way pages are browsed to via StumbleUpon is through the toolbar.

I hope this answers the question for the person that asked the question on Office Hours with Vanessa Fox. If not definitely leave a comment and we’ll figure it out from there! Also, If anyone has more detail or would like to add on to this, please leave a comment and I can even update the post, etc.

Some Notes from Twitter:
– Matt Inman recommended Mint Website Analytics which tracks Viral / Linkbait
– Joost De Valk also has some Mint Peppers (Mint Plugins)