In the course of an up and coming research we have been monitoring click locations of social users, the results will not surprise if you stop and think, but a massive amount of on page clicks by stumblers are located: 
Hmmm right under the stumble button,
Are you ready for stumblers disappointment?
Lets presume that these stumblers are not all racing to your home page, the traditional location for a link in that corner and that they are indeed missing the stumble button can we therefore turn this to our advantage? Many sites have moved to a fixed width central layout so are missing out entirely on this “second” chance to impress but for those left fixed why link to your homepage? Turn this chance to an advantage and link to a “stumble friendly post” or some sort of stumbleupon landing page. With stumblers you traditionally have 1 chance to impress in a very short space of time, so even if a small percentage miss the stumble button is it not worth maximising your fortunate second chance?
9 comments
What a great idea! Most would have said “Quick, throw an ad there” instead you suggest inviting people to further explore the site – an idea that has much more long-term potential then a single accidental click could ever have.
where ya moving to timbucktu?
“Read a random top post on this blog” button
@Andy that would certainly work though perhaps I would tweak it to include just my favourite top posts, avoid the inhouse cleaning messages for example. @Thunk Different We have been moving for months, but we will move the blog to its new home when we get 5 minutes honest
@Michele I’m sure many people first reaction will be an ad, but not only would this lose you a chance to impress again it wouldn’t be any great financial significance most ad networks require you to stay on the ad page for at least a little while, not something a now slightly miffed stumbler is likely to do.
Very interesting, but not surprising if you think too much about it. Curious though as to how you are measuring this?
We have several test sites which use heatmaps to identify click locations, we then match these with referrers. Given we are studying more then just clicks we give stumbler and Diggers unique marker to help us trace them. We can’t identify individuals but can identify where they have come from
This is the dumbest idea I’ve heard in at least the last six months. Talk about artificially trying to make visitors stay on ones site – because THEY MISSED CLICKING THE FUCKING BUTTON. This is of course assuming that everyone have the Stumble toolbar in exactly the default place – I know I don’t and none of my real-life friends do either. Pathetic attempt to market oneself if you ask me.
I was merely pointing out a statistical interest, how you choose to use it is up to you, but would it not be better that your visitors saw something interesting from their accident? The assumption by the way is not an assumption but a statistic in fact the screenshot I to had to remove a toolbar and close all my tabs to get the image, but the location in the top left corner is the most likely location for a stumbler to click.
Thanks for the info. I figured you were using a heatmap of some kind, just figured it would need to be a clickable place to track it accurately. Cheers!