Dave Naffziger's Blog

This post has sat half-written for a while, so I finally decided to finish it…

I’ve immensely enjoyed StumbleUpon as a user, so I decided to play with StumleUpon Ads to understand how it might be effective.

Setup

Given the increasing complexity of AdWords, StumbleUpon Ads are refreshingly simple.

You need $50 to run your first ad. You choose a URL, a category and a daily budget and you have the option of specifying a geography and a demographic. You then pay 5 cents per visit.

That’s it.

You’ll notice in the above graphic that Stumbleupon shows you the number of users by category. Who would have thought that there were 25K users are ‘subscribed’ to the post modernism category?

There is a short wait for approval that took ~1 business day to process. Your page then gets inserted into users’ Stumble-streams. The toolbar for ad-inserted pages look like this (note the mouseover of the little green man):

Stats

Again, super simple. A typical set of campaign stats looks like this:

Without a doubt the coolest metric is the percentage of users that gave the page a thumbs up or a thumbs down. This is a super addictive number, and I found myself extremely interested in comparing this number for multiple content types.

Results

I tested 4 campaigns:

• Two of my own posts that seemed reasonably interesting: Hummer vs. Plane & ISOs vs. NSOs
• CouponLooker: our coupon search engine
• Drivl’s All Mythbuster Myths on One Page: A known StumbleUpon success

Campaigns to my blog:

I brought 522 visitors to my blog for $26. On average, they viewed 1.16 pages (vs. 1.66 from general traffic) and spent 1 min 38s on site (vs 5:25). I roughly added 5-10 readers to my RSS feed ($2.50 to $5 a subscriber). I also added several stumbleupon friends that liked had given the site a thumbs up.

In addition, the visitors added 4 comments to my posts.

The readers rated my content:

• Hummer vs Airline: 3.1% Up, 0.3% Down
• ISOs vs. NSOs: 0.7% Up, 0% Down

The short visits were expected, although I was surprised that they spent as long as they did on site. Neither of the posts hit viral success, and I didn’t receive any additional non-purchased traffic.

All in all, I was relatively pleased with the performance of StumbleUpon Ads. I would definitely recommend it for for new blogs that are hoping to build an audience.

Campaigns to CouponLooker and Drivl:

I ran both of these campaigns because I was fascinated with the thumbs up percentage stats and I wanted to see how they compared against a known success and Couponlooker.

• Drivl: 8.9% Up, 0% Down
• CouponLooker: 1.6% Up; 0% Down

Although the TU% was low, users visited 1.67 pages. Roughly 2/3 of the visitors visited another page. However, only 2% clicked on a coupon that they found. This wasn’t too surprising. Coupon search is very much an as-needed search, not something you really do in your free time.

The Drivl page was popular a long time ago and I’ll presume that it doesn’t get the draw it once had. 9% is probably a lower limit for a truly viral success. I would suspect in its early days, it probably saw a higher Thumbs Up %.

General thoughts

• I felt my money was well spent. This is certainly a qualitative assessment, however it has led me to suggest it to other people.
• I love the simplicity. Adwords is now too complicated for casual/new advertisers. This is a great alternative.
• I was surprised by the percentage of users that seemed to engage with the content (subscribe, comment, try it out). Encouraging signs. However, I doubt many users actually make purchases.
• The Thumbs Up percentage is highly, highly addictive. I wish I could find this number for every bit of content I write, in addition to many sites that I visit and posts I read.
  

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