Stumbleupon Paid Advertising
Recently I discussed how free Stumbleupon visitors were useful to my site…and better quality than the other social bookmarking sites.
Because of this, I decided to test several paid Stumbleupon ads. You can purchase visitors to your site for only 5 cents apiece through their online system. In addition, you can choose the categories they come from. I choose “marketing” and “entrepreneurs” for my primary categories in my campaign.
Their advertising can be purchased here…
Out of 1,000 purchased visits (I’ve actually purchased more, but some of it couldn’t be tracked correctly as I was also generating free Stumbleupon visitors at the same time), they only delivered 845 as counted by Google Analytics. A logical explanation for this is the visitors aren’t even waiting long enough for the site to load before going somewhere else.
Here’s where the numbers suck. The bounce rate for PAID Stumbleupon traffic was 82.02%. This means only 17.98% of visitors even went to a second page on my site. That’s an absolutely pitiful rate for a blog…and shows the quality of these paid Stumbles was very poor.
Free Stumbleupon traffic was averaging 41.52% bounce rate. So 58.48% of those were visiting other pages. And get this…these numbers were driven to the SAME PAGE that did well with free Stumbles. Ouch!
Overall…they delivered less visitors than I paid for. The visitors they delivered were much lower quality than the average free stumblers.
Although they’re a great free service to use, I definitely wouldn’t recommend their paid advertising.
Blog Advertising Tip: I didn’t know if I should reveal this here or only save it for my print newsletter subscribers. I decided to share the basic message here, although the February print issue will go more in depth on the subject.
It isn’t worth sending paid advertising to the blog.
This includes PPC traffic (my favorite form of paid advertising), advertising on other blogs, blog reviews, ezine ads, etc. Even if you develop a landing page on the blog specifically for a form of traffic (see this page as an example…)
There are simply too many distractions on the blog for it to work well with paid advertising. I’m sure it can be done, and I have ran several profitable ads to the blog, but it’s not as effective as developing a landing squeeze page.
For paid advertising of any type, don’t drive visitors to your blog. Drive them to a squeeze page. Here’s an example one that generates subscribers to this blog.
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9 Responses to “Stumbleupon Paid Advertising”
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Hi Terry, which one better between stumble and facebook for advertising.
thank you
semmy
Semmy: I wouldn’t do paid advertising on either one. Low cost ads are low cost for a reason. If you haven’t already started, I recommend PPC for paid advertising. This includes Google, Yahoo, and MSN, but not the “cheaper ones.”
[...] But don’t take my word for it…click here to read the original post. [...]
[...] Stumbleupon Paid Advertising [...]
a newbie that is me
[...] But don’t take my word for it…click here to read the original post. [...]
[...] are a lot of ways you can generate low quality paid traffic. For example I advertised on Stumble for 5 cents per visitor (very low quality). You can use co-registrations to build your lists. [...]
great review. I was wondering about this and I am glad that you tested it out.
I use StumbleUpon Paid Discovery. It’s been absolutely invaluable to me in refining content. Just think: If you can grab the attention of someone whose natural tendency is to click away, you’ve got something.
Looking at my 30 day stats:
Pages/visit 1.98
Avg time on site 00:00:25
Bounce rate 26.10%
The bonus to all this is the more relevant and engaging I can make my content, the more SU shows my page as a free stumble. The goal, of course, is to eventually be 100% free.