Posted on Wednesday 27th of December 2006 at 09:09 in Make Money Online

Advertising your website - part two - StumbleUpon ads

As approached in part one, StumbleUpon is a very powerful if not misunderstood place which, if reached correctly, can vastly increase your traffic. However it came to my attention that you can pay for advertising with them - so I had to investigate whether this is of any use further.

Advertising on StumbleUpon
When paying for ads on StumbleUpon you're not buying ad-space as you would in other campaigns - what you're paying for is an increased weighting within their engine - so an increased percentage of users will be directed to a page you specify (again based around their loose tagging system). So you could set up a campaign directing users to a page about Vista and tag it as "operating system" and "windows" and get semi-targetted traffic. As covered in part one - the quality of traffic from social bookmarking sites is debatable but you are going to get targetted visitors... So let's look at how it works.

How it works
Load up www.stumbleupon.com/ads in your browser and create an account with them. You're then prompted to set up a campaign:



The above image shows that you can get fairly accurate with the tagging system - so the traffic you'll drive will have selected your topic as an area of interest - which won't guarantee that they'll hang around but it does help.

You can get much more specific than that too, specifying geographical locations for your stumblers to be from, age ranges and sexes - so you can cater to a specific market if you feel the urge. Finally you select how many visitors you wish to receive a day. at a cost of $0.05 per visitor it's not great, although you may argue that's good value for money it just isn't. Simple maths highlights that for $5 you'll have yourself 100 new visitors to your site, so $50 gives you 1,000 but that's where conventional maths ends because you can't forget that people are being directed to your site through a very loose topic system rather than through choice. 1,000 new people to your site is very unlikely to translate correctly into your current conversion statistics. These people are more than likely to stay on your site for 10 seconds or less before navigating away.

I ran an experiment
I decided to run a very small experiment using this system so created my very own campaign directing them to this page - a statistics based article with a graph and a fairly interesting topic. The logic was that a graph should be sufficient to make people stay - if only to finish reading it. You have to wait for your campaign to be approved (I assume this is to stop innapropriate things from being advertised) which took less than 30minutes. Once approved I credited my account with $5 to bring in 100 new visitors and set it off.



The image above shows the campaign (with my email address removed). So what were the results?

Results
What I'd hoped to happen didn't - you see, sites popular on SU have a chance of going viral for a short time (lots of people vote to say it's good, more people see it, more people vote etc) but unfortunately there was only 3% of users gave the page a positive vote and I fear that was just me. One person added my site to their "i like it" and that was it, 100 visitors with no new comments against the articles, no noticable increase in traffic from it going SU viral and a bank account with $5 less in it.

Conclusion
Well I don't really see how it's useful because 100% of the users come to your site out of luck more than intention so you're paying for people to visit your site for a matter of seconds before stumbling away. But $5 is absolutely nothing at all and I'm sure that if you threw more money at it, more people would give the page a positive vote and therefore increase traffic anyway. So it's not my personal choice and certainly not a good option if you're selling something but there is something to be said for the ingenuity of how it works.

The Series of Articles
See below the published articles on the topic:
Introduction
Part One: Social Bookmarking
Part Two: StumbleUpon Advertising
Part Three: Buying Traffic
Part Four: Text-Link-Ads
Part Five: Sharing Traffic
Conclusion

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