Internet Explorer is still the king of the internet, according to us here at Chitika, and most all other sources. Despite surges in popularity in browsers like Chrome and Firefox, and a mobile market dominated by Safari and Chrome, IE versions continue to maintain a majority share of traffic.
As we have seen in the past, however, different sources of traffic can have radically different browser distributions. This has highly evident when looking at some popular social networks and the type of traffic they drive to your site.
Given this, Chitika Insights took a look at all US and Canadian traffic between April 13th-April 19th to three social networks that generate a significant number of hits to our network, Facebook, Twitter, and Stumbleupon.
While only these websites can know for sure what their traffic distribution truly looks like, as we only see the sample that generates referrals within our network, a clear story is told:
| stumbleupon | |||
| MSIE | 72.041% | 35.272% | 10.569% |
| Firefox | 12.958% | 29.350% | 44.313% |
| Chrome | 9.146% | 18.904% | 25.188% |
| Safari | 3.041% | 10.848% | 18.315% |
| Opera | 1.423% | 4.762% | 0.200% |
| Mobile | 1.345% | 0.649% | 1.164% |
| Other | 0.046% | 0.215% | 0.252% |
While Facebook sees a disproportionately high number of MSIE users within our traffic sample (largely a credit to it being a popular office hour website), Twitter sees a browser distribution far more indicative of a “tech-savvy” audience.
Stumbleupon referrals, however, were barely over 10% Internet Explorer. Among all referrals from the popular “discovery engine”, Internet Explorer was a distant fourth, trailing Firefox, Chrome, and even Safari.
Given what we know about the ad susceptibility of certain browsers, one can conclude Stumbleupon traffic is not the best traffic when it comes to individual clicks on your ads. However, a tactic of becoming popular among the tech-forward users of Stumbleupon by way of quality website content could become a driver of other traffic, and perhaps increase one’s algorithm ranking in Google and other search engines.
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