StumbleUpon Paid Advertising Experience

[webcosmo]

Last week I bumped into a thread at DigitalPoint forum somebody claiming had great results with StumbleUpon paid advertising. Generally I follow the rule "Nothing is proven to work until try it myself". I decided to give it a try, since I am working on Creating a Buzz for one of my sites.

How StumbleUpon works?

StumbleUpon helps you discover and share websites. As you click on the Stubmle button they deliver pages matched to your personal preferences (you have to install the stumbleupon wizard on your computer). These pages are generally, except paid ones, are recommended by other websurfers with interests similar to yours.

If you like a page you can rate it as "I like it", or if you dislike a page you can rate it as "I don't like it".

StumbleUpon uses these ratings to show pages when somebody click on the "Stumble" button.

How paid StumbleUpon works?

Paid StumbleUpon guarantees that your site/page will be shown certain number of times no matter anybody like it or dislike it. Main idea behind paid StumbleUpon advertising is getting as many "I Like It" ratings as possible. The more you have the "I like it" ratings the more number of times your site will be shown to others without any money spending.

Link to paid StumbleUpon http://www.stumbleupon.com/ads/

Creating a campaign

Just click on the "create new campaign" button. StumbleUpon paid advertising will allow you target demographics by:

- Category & subcategories like arts, computer etc

- Gender

- Age Range

- Location (Country, state, city)

- How many visitors you want per day

I choose the University category with 500 max per day.

Add fund to your campaign

They offer PayPal payment only at this moment. Sometimes it takes about 3-5 days to clear the PayPal payment. StumbleUpon would not start delivering you traffic until the payment clears. For me it took three days to clear the payment.

I added $25 (which is minimum) for my campaign.

Cost per visitor

As of this moment they are charging 5 cents US per visitor. I think that's kind of high considering the StumbleUpon traffic behavior.AverageStumbleUpon users spend 2-3 seconds on a site with average pageview of 1.

Campaign Statistics

StumbleUpon will show you campaign statistics to see how your campaign is doing. There is only three main items on statistics Visitors, % Liked, % Disliked.

Summary

From the StumbleUpon paid advertising campaign spending I got 501 visitors, 0.3% Liked, 0.5% Disliked, 1.2 pages/visitor(according to Google Analytics). I consider this as a total failure advertising campaign. I lost $25 but I learned.

I think if you have an interesting site StumbleUpon paid advertising is the option you could take. You have about a second to impress the StumbleUpon user making them click on the "I like it". If you have a boring site like an e-commerce site, its not a good idea taking that route.

[link removed]

[Cricket]

Gentle Reminder: Although we truly appreciate you sharing your experiences with us, we do not allow linking to your own site(s) outside of the Webmaster Marketplace as applicable. Thank you for understanding.

[Comenius]

Thanks for posting your experience. While I've never paid for StumbleUpon traffic, I imagine I'd have a similar experience. I think SU traffics ranks a couple notches above script generated traffic, in other words, it's about as low quality as you can get.

[rembrant]

Stumble UPon has had mixed reviews in my friends eyes. I have never paid for traffic so I don't know. Any opinions of SU out there?

[greenfinger]

I've been stumbling lately, it's very addictive to be honest. The problem is as you say that people tend to just flick on after a second unless you have some really mind-engaging or eye catching stuff on display.

Sometimes even worse - if your server seems to be slow (as an advertiser) the users just click again on the stumble button thus completely bypassing your site view yet still being charged for it as a hit by SU!.

I know this could be an issue too because there have been many many times while stumbling that I've encountered poor performing servers which irritated me so I just clicked along to the next site without actually getting to see which site I'd just bypassed.

[scarpettimonster]

Interesting, I have wondered about the effectiveness of stubleUpon advertising. I've been a stumbler for some time and, like greenfinger, noticed my propensity to skip pages which do not load immediately or grab me in the first 5 seconds. I am also disinclined to bother thumbing pages up or down unless they are particularly excellent or terrible. Also, I predominately stumble for entertainment.

Extrapolating from your experience, I surmise I am a more typical stumbler than I realized. That said, perhaps you could improve your StumbleUpon campaign performance by designing a fast loading teaser page with easily digested (and more entertainment-centric) content which, after piquing their interest, offers the user a chance to learn more.

Thanks for sharing.

[greenfinger]

I have just begun a trial sponsor run on Stumbleupon for the site in my signature..

If you're interested in the results I can report back in a few weeks.

Considering I'm not selling anything on the site I know I will not get much in the way of fiscal returns from this unless someone stops for long enough and decides to sponsor us.

It will be interesting, I plan on limiting the number of exposures per day to prevent the funds from being depleted too quickly if something goes awry.

[BradP]

Originally Posted by Comenius

Thanks for posting your experience. While I've never paid for StumbleUpon traffic, I imagine I'd have a similar experience. I think SU traffics ranks a couple notches above script generated traffic, in other words, it's about as low quality as you can get.

It is not exactly low quality as those crappy traffic exchanges, some of the stumblers out there are very intelligent users and they write beautiful reviews.

Only thing is the attention span is short and if nobody shows interest in the first five seconds, you could be the only one stumbling your own content.

[lochaberaxe]

I've gotten similar traffic numbers for free from SU, following a few basic rules:
-Create an article with a bit of controversy or strong opinion (or any good content)
-Linkbait title the page
-Submit it to stumbleupon exchange during peak traffic hours (17:00-21:00 hours)

The value of the traffic is not great, but it only takes a few minutes, and will churn some visitors your way.

[woodcs82]

Stumble Upon produced traffic for us, however; they did NOT convert to any sales.

[micksss]

Same here and not even any results for my sites that have adsense either.

[coolsaint]

Stumble upon is great option to get some extra traffic. But Pay for Stumble Upon visitor? I don't think so. I belive it is not worthy. Thanks everybody to share your experience with stumble upon paid service. I was interested to know about this for some time.

[sniperhiga]

They charge almost nothing, but ROI almost 0. Stumblers never buy things online!

[DannyBly]

I've had a good experience with Stumbleupon and I think the traffic is reasonably priced - as suggested earlier I think you do have to have a site with immediate appeal to make the most of this medium though : )

[steveAR]

good post and i dont think ill pay SU for traffic when you can get it for free.

[clink]

Great post, very helpful. I think that paying for SU traffic would only be good if you're making money directly from your post and it's REALLY engaging. Something like 'WATCH THIS VIDEO OF A MONKEY SHAGGING A HIPPO'. For me StumbleUpon is somewhat like reality television - it's a bit crap but achieves massive public success.

[mit]

The main thing for any advertiser is : Relevant Traffic. Until we don't get traffic that would be relevant to our business, it would be useless then.

[Comfis]

i get free traffic from stumble upon and it brings nothing.. so i would never pay for this..

tnx for sharing anyway!

PS: Maybe the stumble upon links can bring you profit