It’s probably not good form that I’m talking about Theater Hopper’s site traffic with you, but I thought this was a funny story that you might enjoy.

Last night when I got home from work, I settled down at the kitchen table and was checking the site’s traffic while Henry was eating dinner. Looking at my logs, traffic to the site was on par with an average Monday. Refreshing the logs a little later, I saw an insane jump in the number of hits. About half of Monday’s traffic gathered in the time span of about 15 minutes.

I was checking my referrals to see where the traffic was coming from, but using my real-time counter, could only see they were coming from StumbleUpon. I couldn’t see where on my site they were landing.

A Henry finished eating, I folded up my laptop content to wait for Google Analytics to pull the landing page information once it had time to log the traffic a few hours later (Google Analytics runs on a delay).

I gave Henry a bath, put him to bed and left to get a haircut (while Cami was still at home) before coming back to check on the traffic logs. I logged in to Google Analytics and saw that it had been populated with the new data. I checked on Traffic Sources, I went to Referring Sites, I identified StumbleUpon and I filtered the results by landing page.

What was the comic everyone was going so crazy about? This one. A guess strip by Clay and Hampton Yount of Rob and Elliott from 4 years ago.

You probably found this story underwhelming. Imagine how I feel!

In all seriousness, though – Rob and Elliott is an excellent comic and their guest strip from 2005 is actually one of my favorites. If people are checking it out, all the better. Because that means not only are they visiting the site and boosting my numbers, but they’re seeing that link back to Rob and Elliot and hopefully checking out more of Clay and Hampton’s stuff, too.

I’ll just be damned if I can figure out exactly how StumbleUpon works!