Marketing, StumbleUpon
Do StumbleUpon Ads Actually Work
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
Hey Charles,
nice article!
I’ve been wanting to try StumbleUpon Ads myself, but never found the time to actually do it…
Never heard of GoClick.com. It is worth testing it out: the price seems very competitive, but we need to assess the quality of the traffic… Is it going to convert?
Keep us updated with your test results!
Thanks.
Vittorio, GoClick is working well for me on another project I am working on. I will be writing about it in the next day or so. The article will be about using PPC to generate cash. I will cover several concepts from long tail keyword selection to Pay Per Click (PPC). Thanks for the encouragement.
I have tried StumbleUpon Ads before. They have a support forum for the ads that no one from StumbleUpon has answered for months.
I have had better results rounding up a few of my SU friends to thumb up a page. Not in the spamming way, but only if they really see its value. Plus, it’s free.
Redirecting targeted expired domain traffic is far more efficient.There’s a service on my site that provides this. As for ppc,is anyone still using Miva? I used them a year ago before I discovered AdBrite which has demographic targeted.
I tried to create 1 campaign and was rejected. I try to send question to the SU support team. May they’ll give me a reason. Why is this happened.
Let me know if you get a real answer from StumbleUpon. Their support response left me no better off than I was before. It seems like maybe StumbleUpon Advertising was an idea that hasn’t been actually implemented or officially dropped. I’d be interested to know your results.
I think so, I saw info at Mashable.com. And they told about require minimum for advertising is $20. But I’m not sure.
Hi Charles,
I’ve been running a StumbleUpon ad for about a month now, in various configurations, but basically the same site which is for a children’s book. I pay $5 a day, get 100 stumbles, and a few free ones here and there. I’ve changed it around until it runs well without getting thumbs down by changing the targeted audience to children’s books, rather than something broader. However, I’ve recently come on some strange behavior that I have been trying to get explained to me by StumbleUpon, so far unsuccessfully. I was checking the metrics of my website by pausing the ad for a few days, then resuming it for a period of time to generate a set number of click-thrus, then checking my website metrics to see that in fact I was getting them. I was, so that was great, everything was working as advertised. However, there was a bit of a mystery in how the ads were deploying. I happened to try this the first time about 4:30. Within 5 minutes I got 17 stumbles. Great, I thought. The next day I tried it in the morning, no stumbles for a half hour. I tried it in the afternoon about 4:30, 17 stumbles in 5 minutes, then no more for 20 minutes, at when point I paused the campaign. The next day at 5:00 I resumed it again, 17 stumbles in 5 minutes, no more for 20 minutes, at which point I paused the campaign. This went on for 5 days, same results, same time, same quick response each day, always 17 stumbles. On the 5th day, I waited 15 minutes after pausing after the first 17 stumbles (they took 5 minutes again), then got another 17 stumbles in 5 minutes. I set up another ad directing to a different URL, same audience, same product, different URL, got 17 stumbles 7 minutes after the ad started running.
Maybe StumbleUpon just likes prime numbers. Do you have any idea what is going on here? I don’t know why you can’t get on for $5, as they have in their drop-down menu 100 stumbles, and this is what I choose. My category is children’s books, which has less indicated that yours at 67, so I don’t think that is the problem.
I’ll check out the goclick, as I have been using Facebook and StumbleUpon, finding Facebook ads the most effective so far, nothing from StumbleUpon that I can measure other than the traffic to my site. I started a GoogleAds today, and will see how that measures up.
rmcdow, wow that’s some detailed analysis. Thank you for sharing the information. It’s been a while since I explored StumbleUpons advertising. I gave up on it after getting such frustrating results. I agree that Facebook ads are the way to go these days. We’ve used them quite a bit with positive results.
Thank you for mentioning GoClick. I need to remove them from this article reprint. They have closed their doors. I’ve been using 7Search instead for some sites. The have a great reporting system and the traffic costs are still affordable.
Let me think on your question and talk it over with Toff and see what we can come up with. I suspect that StumbleUpon Ads are very subjective and not at all like typical ad campaigns.