StumbleUpon Ads are suppose to be the hot thing these days right? Well, to prove the theory I decided to place my own StumbleUpon Ads to see what the big deal was all about. After six ad rejections what I discovered will interest you so read on.

The process of placing a request for my Stumble Ad was pretty simple. With my selected domain name in hand I headed over to StumbleUpon, signed up as an advertiser, and followed their step by step process to place the ad.

StumbleUpon’s idea of an ad is actually just the inclusion of a link to your website in their index of sites that are part of the regular Stumble rotation. The “ad” works the same way all other Stumbles work except a green button will appear on the StumbleUpon toolbar that says “sponsor” when your site is shown. Other than that the visitor is suppose to have no other distractions, just a full view of your page in the browser.

As part of my desire to sample Stumble Ads I placed a request to get 100 visitors at .05 cents per visitor. I chose a StumbleUpon predefined category for my content and submitted my request. Everything was very simple. The category I selected was “Christian” which at the time had a “(67)” next to it. According to StumbleUpon that 67 is suppose to mean, “Category name (thousands of users subscribed)”. So, I felt confident that everything was okay and my request was placed into a que as a pending request. According to StumbleUpon’s FAQ it would take 24 hours for the request to be processed. So I waited.

Well, less than 24 hours later I received this email:

Hi,

We’re sorry to inform you that one of your StumbleUpon advertising campaigns cannot be accepted at this time.

There are not a sufficient number of people to view your ad in the category you have selected. Try broadening your targeting and resubmit your campaign.

Please feel free to check our content guidelines or submit other sites for approval as well.

Sincerely,

The StumbleUpon Team

So, I decided to try again. In fact, I tried again six times over the course of three day using different domains and different categories. The only thing I didn’t do was increase my ad spend from $5 a day to some higher value. I guess that is my next thing to try. It should make for an interesting part two to the story.

Overall, here is what I am thinking. Bare in mind it is totally a conspiracy theory. I am beginning to think one of two things, either StumbleUpon is overstating their numbers and they don’t have enough traffic to support their claims, or they are not interested in dealing with a $5 dollar a day ad spend even though they claim you can jump in at that level. I am sure there is something else going on here. It could be that I am doing something wrong, but it is more fun to think of myself as the hard hitting Water Gate reporter type.

Conspiracy theories aside, I did find you a good alternative source of cheap traffic that is just as easy to use as StumbleUpon Ads and the quality of the traffic is about the same. The site is appropriately called goClick.com and it offers access to category based traffic with rates as low as .01 cent per click.

The goClick system works similar to a Google Adwords campaign. You bid on keywords and categorize your site for inclusion in their network of traffic. The initial account can be pre-funded with as little as $10 dollars. This is good for you because you can test your traffic strategies without sinking a lot of money and when the ad spend is up you can’t spend more than your account funds.

GoClick isn’t going to provide a particularly high volume solution, but it is cheap and if you are smart and put metrics in place to measure the response rate of your visitors, it can be a good source of cheap traffic that you can use to test conversions. Once you have even a small amount of conversion success using this low quality cheap traffic, then you can move up to a higher quality more expensive Adword pay per click campaign. I recommend this method of testing and measuring over jumping head long into an expensive Adwords campaign.

So yes, maybe I’m just doing something wrong with StumbleUpon. But, I don’t really care. GoClick is working for my purposes for now and I will continue to experiment with StumbleUpon. If you do find yourself in the same situation, be sure to let me know. I would be interested to know how many other people have had this happen.

Also, if you have suggestions for a solution, leave your comments for that too.

Stumbling on Stumble Ads,

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com

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