StumbleUpon Ads Review

For those unfamiliar with StumbleUpon, according to their website, it is a service that “discovers web sites based on your interests. Whether it’s a web page, photo or video, our personalized recommendation engine learns what you like, and brings you more.” Essentially, you install a toolbar to your browser, you tell StumbleUpon what subject matter interests you, and then when you click the “Stumble” button it takes you to a website related to those subjects which you can then rate as “I like it!” or thumbs down. There are currently 6,562,756 StumbleUpon accounts.

StumbleUpon generates revenue by allowing advertisers to purchase “stumbles” for $.05 a visitor. Getting started is so extremely quick and straightforward that you will probably be wondering if missed something important along the way… that is until the visitors start coming. They will start coming very quickly and there will be many of them.

You are able to specify what gender, age, country and state you want your visitors to be in. Unfortunately, they do not have time zone targeting and you cannot, as far as I could tell, select multiple states.You are also able to specify how many visitors you want a day in 100, 250, 500, 1000, 2000, and 3000 increments. Somewhat unique to online advertising, StumbleUpon allows you to see whether viewers liked or disliked your website. This aspect makes it extremely interesting to check your stats (if not addicting).

You can choose in which category your site will appear. There are too many to list here, but for our virtual assistant website, I chose the “Entrepreneur” category as our service appeals most to micro and small business owners.

To give you an idea of how quickly the traffic comes, I purchased $25.00 worth of traffic at 4.37 pm. Visitors started coming to my site within a few minutes and I got an email at 12:04 am letting me know that my funds had been depleted. So, in a little over 8 hours, I recieved 500 visitors to LongerDays.com.

Now, to get down to the nitty gritty, as far as I am aware, none of these 500 visitors signed up for our virtual assistant service – at least not during the time that StumbleUpon was driving traffic. Whether the site was bookmarked for later reference and will at some point yield a client is difficult to tell as StumbleUpon does not provide any kind of tracking code a la Google Adword’s Site Stats.

I monitored the vistors as they came to the site and could see how many of them got past our main page and explored the site and how many of them quickly navigated away. As you would expect, most navigated away within 20-30 seconds but an impressive number lingered past the one minute mark and went 2-4 pages deep into the site. I would estimate that around 5% made it past one page. This may not sound like much but at $.05 a visitor, it seems like a good value to me.

In spite of the fact that we did not get any new client’s, I would have to say that I definitely recommend the service. I think that I will probably be using it differently in the future, such as driving traffic to a specific blog post (rather than our main website on virtual assistance), as this more closely aligns with the type of content one typically finds on StumbleUpon and I think it would be better received. For instance, a blog post on “Four ways to leverage a virtual assistant to boost your small business” would probably do very well in the “Entrepreneurship” category.

In my mind, this is a great online advertising tool if you are looking to generate some buzz around a specific piece of content on your site that others would find interesting, unique, or useful – these seem to be the three things Stumblers, like Diggers, are drawn to.

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Tagged as: 2.0, ads, online advertising, review, stumbleupon