I was looking through the Google Analytics for this site this evening and saw an interesting correlation in my referral traffic between the level of familiarity of the source and the bounce rate for the traffic from that source. I guess when you think about it, it makes sense – inbound links from twitter will typically be from people who have chosen to follow me, and are therefore interested on some level in what I may have to say – the bounce rate of that traffic is the lowest of all the inbound source. By contrast, the bounce rate of inbound traffic from stumbleupon is the highest of all traffic sources – the visitors are arriving on the site through some random recommendation/matching algorithm and are least likely to be interested in browsing further through the site.

Of course this just confirms what we already know – recommendations / referrals from people in your extended network or community hold the most value. It stands to reason that if we were trying to convince visitors to take some kind of action on a site, the best results would be from those who arrived via a referral of this kind. Chris Brogan and Julien Smith have a term (and book) Trust Agent that rings true in this case. Quality trumps quantity every time.