Digg Effect - In Living Color

A few days ago, I posted an article saying that I got “Dugg”, meaning I got an article onto Digg.com and it sent me a big traffic spike. This was for an article called “Can Linux Replace Windows?” published over on PC Mechanic. I thought I would share with you the stats from the Digg Effect using screenshots from Google Analytics.

This is a graph which shows the visits. You can see that for a couple days ago, we had a nice traffic spike. However,

The bounce rate went up quite a bit, too. Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who come to the site and immediately leave. Meaning they visit only one page and then leave the site. So, while Digg sent us more traffic, they sent us primarily people who were only interested in seeing the one article and then immediately left.

Look at the bounce rate on that one article. Amazing.

I’m not going to show screenshots of my Google Adsense account in this forum, but needless to say that the daily revenue did not significantly increase.

So, yeah, the Digg Effect basically means:

• Nice traffic spike, but short lasting
• No real increase in revenue

In short, it’s cool. But, it doesn’t pay the bills and doesn’t lead to anything long term. Digg can be part of your strategy, but don’t depend on it.

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