StumbleUpon has the potential to drive huge amounts of traffic to your website or blog. Unlike its close counterpart Digg, however, the targeting is more generic in nature. With StumbleUpon you are trying to align your page or site with the appropriate category and demographic to advertise to. The costs are relatively inexpensive ($0.05 per click as I write this) my experience so far has been that the types of people that visit stay briefly and move on – which is natural given the model upon which StumbleUpon is built.
My $20 StumbleUpon Experiment
After being lured in by the cheap 5 cent clicks that StumbleUpon offers, I thought I would test it out and tossed $20 at it to see what kind of results you could get.
Targeting Your Page or Site
The first step is to choose a URL that you want to send the visitors to. They suggest (and I recommend) choosing a single page within your site that your demographic or target audience would be interested in. A popular page that has broad appeal is your best candidate, as your goal is to entice Stumblers to go deeper into your site, pick up some RSS readers, or maybe get a few newsletter subscribers.
I chose a page that I believed had broad appeal, selected the category I believed the page would fall under, and funded the campaign with $20.
Waiting For Approval of Your Ads
The next step is to wait for the StumbleUpon team to approve your ads. In the few times that I have experienced this process (and from the people I have spoken with) it usually takes a few hours for your campaign to be approved. Once it is approved you will be notified by email that your campaign is running.
Watching the Traffic Come In
One of the things I dislike about StumbleUpon advertising is that they don’t tell you once your campaign starts running. Even though it’s active, you may not start getting clicks for several hours. Once your ad/URL starts showing though, you start getting a lot of visits… fast.
In the End I Received 1,587 Visitors for $20
So, how do StumbleUpon Advertising do? No doubt about it, StumbleUpon drove quite a bit of traffic for only $20. Although I only paid for 400 visitors, several StumbleUpon users liked it which drove more traffic to the page – 1,187 more than I actually paid for. That is the great thing about StumbleUpon Advertising, if your campaign is successful it will actually drive more visits at no additional cost. However, the visitors ended up staying on the page only an average of 10 seconds and there were no conversions. So while it drove a lot of traffic – the quality just wasn’t there.
Would I do it again? Maybe. For a page that I am wanting some exposure on or gaining some attention – but for trying to convert these visitors into sales, I think that the money is better spent on pay per click.
Just wanted to say thanks for writing a review. I just signed up with $50, and in my case I am selling a software product. I advertised in the Internet Tools section. I am expecting a high bounce rate, but if I get just a couple of sales, it may be worth it to me. What will be especially interesting to me (after reading your article) is the number of additional visits I receive beyond what I paid for. Thanks!
David
Glad to hear it helped you out. I think the key is to identify the goal for advertising, gear your content toward Stumbleupon demographics, and then test it out.
I’ve actually had some good success and even conversions from them. If anything, if you’re site’s optimized well you can get some extra visitors, gain a few RSS subscribers, and have a chance at really boosting your content distribution.
So I thought I would report back and say that on day one I received 500 paid hits and 15 free hits. I’m going to continue for a little longer and see if the number of free hits increases over time. I also did get someone to signup to our site, so it is possible that will become a sale. Also, when it comes to sales I have found that someone who looks today may buy tomorrow or next week, so I will continue tracking:
1. Free clicks
2. Signups
3. Sales
Hopefully, I can start to establish some trends and at the very least improve product recongnition.
Thanks so much for your honest review about SU. I started a new blog and thought that SU would help me market it. I Have just paid $30 for advertising on SU and now am not waiting for any conversion after reading your post.
So I spent a little over $100 and I managed to get one sale and two signups. Most likely it was a “loser” for me, but certainly was good for branding. I don’t see a benefit of continuous spending, but I may try again in a couple of weeks.
I would be curious what would happen if I started to reach the top of a category in terms of hits, or if free steadily increased, but at this point the last 2 days were 0.
I’m not unhappy, but didn’t quite profit either (but not too far off).
This is interesting. I’m wary about the conversions, but I’ll give it a go. I think a compelling headline and some good copy and an opt-in form could be enough to get them to sign up.