Ask HN: Efficiency of StumbleUpon advertising ? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Efficiency of StumbleUpon advertising ?

10 pointshuhtenberg8 comments

After having watched SU's demo of their ad services, I am impressed in a sense that it's based on a simple model which just cannot not work.

Does anyone has an experience with them ?

Specifically, what are the visitors they send to the advertised pages like ? Are they of the in-and-out variety that spends mere seconds on a site, or do they actually look around (assuming there is something to look at) ?

Thanks

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I spent about $200 on it promoting http://www.christmasbingocards.com last December 1st through December 17th or so. The idea for that site is it pitches exactly ONE thing with laser focus. The idea for the advertising campaign was "Get this in front of technically aware moms, have them blog about it, win".

I received overwhelmingly targeted traffic. They loved it. I got plenty of thumbs. 95% of them left within 2 seconds. The remainder did not give me the blog links I was hoping to get from the experience.

I got much, much better results from the concurrent campaign I did on AdWords. User engagement was much higher (downloads, comments, clickthroughs to my site, time on page, etc). If you compared prices per interested user (defined as someone who didn't bounce in 2 seconds or less) AdWords was something like a twentieth the price of SU. And I wasn't even using it for conversion related purposes -- if I had, I think I'd probably have spent about $10,000 on SU for every $25 sale I made.

I will not be using SU again for this site this Christmas, or for any of my similar promotions. It is just drastically inferior to my other options for spending time and money to promote things.

(Incidentally: I received a few thousand organic stumbles, too, and they were about as useless as the ones I paid for.)

I'd like to qualify this with some additional advice.

Advertising, on SU, a site that's not build for the SU audience, is likely to fail exactly as you've described.

If you're going to advertise on SU, you should craft the page that you do advertise to be instantly attention-grabbing, short, and tuned to give you whatever result it is that you want.

http://www.christmasbingocards.com/ , for example, is clear and immediately obvious, but not very attention grabbing. If I'm stumbling around looking for interesting stuff, I will not be grabbed by this page, no matter how well targeted to my demographics it might be, because it's not targeted to my frame of mind.

On the other hand, if you'd published a cartoon instead, for example, something obviously funny, chances are most stumblers would have read it. Then, your job would have been to create a cartoon that's funny and also encourages the reader to click around the site.

That's no easy feat, I'll grant you, but the point is, if you want to get useful traffic out of StumbleUpon, you have to tailor the content to the channel-surfing frame of mind.

In our experience, we received a high bounce rate of 80+% and about a 20 second time spent on page. This is definitely some of the worst traffic you can get. Some days you'll get much worse results, like 95% bounce and 8 seconds on page.

Keep in mind that once you put the money in, you can't get it out. So, even if you do test, put the minimum amount of money in.

I imagine stumbleupon traffic would be even less likely to stick around on your site than Digg/Reddit traffic, which I wouldn't buy probably even at 10 cents per thousand.

While I have never done any advertising on StumbleUpon, I will say that my experience with traffic referred from SU matches with many of the other comments here. They will generate a lot of hits but quality is low. The bounce rate is many times higher than other traffic sources and the return rate of those visitors is almost non-existant.

* As a disclaimer, I do know someone who has an upper level job there, but it's pretty clear that hasn't influenced my opinions about the service. :)

I tried adwords, Facebook Ads, and stumbleupon for http://www.reviews-web-hosting.com/

Adword: $0.90 per visitor in average Facebook Ad: $0.45 per visitor Stumbleupon: $0.05 ($25 for 500 users)

I haven't see much difference in behavior from these 3 origins, but that may be because nobody spends much time on the website :-(

Whatever advice we give you, you'll need to test it. Your landing page, your target market, your target demographic, etc are all different from our experiences and they interact in unexpected ways.

If you believe it cannot not work, then throw a sensible but low amount of $ at it and see what happens.

If something just "cannot not work" then it will broke unexpectedly and will take you by surprise.

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