My Experiments with StumbleUpon Ads - High Quality Traffic @ 2 Cents or less Per Visitor!

[Deepak Media]

In this post I am going to give you valuable ideas and tips for advertising with StumbleUpon. I started using SU ads only a few months back and so far I have been blown away by the results. You can drive very high quality visitors to your page as low as 2 cents per visitor. And the icing on the cake is that you can target the visitors based on gender, age and location.

There is a small difference between the visitors from PPC and from SU. In PPC ads, the visitors that you get are proactively looking for a specific solution and hence the conversion ratio may be higher with such traffic. But you know the costs!

The traffic from SU are not as needy as the former ones, but you can expect reasonable conversions from SU traffic provided that you have make them an offer that they cannot refuse. It works particularly well for lead campaigns where the visitors do not have to pay anything right away.

SU does not allow you to put sales pages in their system. Think of SU ads as you would think about article marketing. You post articles in ezine articles and other article directories which gives away free information and then redirects the visitor to your sales page. In you want to leverage the SU system, you have to think in a similar fashion.

The cost of advertising in SU is fixed at 5 cents per visitor, but if your content is good, many people will give a "thumbs up" for your content and you can reduce the cost to 2 cents or even in some cases just 1 cent per visitor.

In my experiments with stumbleupon, I wasted a lot of money in driving traffic to pages which were in some way obviously promotional. In such cases I got no conversions and no residual traffic.

Then I posted a video which was very informative and in the end of the video it asked the viewer to visit a particular URL if they needed more information. Many visitors were generous enough to give a "thumbs up" and I started getting residual traffic from that campaign. See the screenshot below, right now the effective cost per visitor is just 1.78¢ and it will go down as I get more residual traffic!



The blue bar represents paid traffic and the green ones are free. I paid $5 two times for the initial boost. Once you start getting positive votes, then you can leave it for a while.

This traffic is for a youtube video. Even if the traffic from SU stops completely, my youtube video with a few thousands views is always a great asset. It will start getting traffic on its own.

The best thing about SU ads is that you can test it with a few dollars. If you get some positive votes, you know it works and then you can scale it up. If you do not get any residual traffic for your campaign, drop it and test more.

And the URL is www.stumbleupon.com/ads/

[Toby Lewis]

Looks good, how did it actually convert in the end?

A warning to people trying this - you need to advertise a natural looking useful page. Don't try sending a squeeze page or directly to an ezine article as it'll get rejected.

[Deepak Media]

Originally Posted by Aith

Looks good, how did it actually convert in the end?

A warning to people trying this - you need to advertise a natural looking useful page. Don't try sending a squeeze page or directly to an ezine article as it'll get rejected.

It does not convert as good as PPC but since the cost is low I am getting quite a good ROI. It is good enough to keep doing this. I cannot reveal any exact figures.

[ronitdeep]

I have also heard good things Bout SU ads.
I am definitly looking forward to test small campaigns with SU ads soon.

[Deepak Media]

Originally Posted by ronitdeep

I have also heard good things Bout SU ads.
I am definitly looking forward to test small campaigns with SU ads soon.

Make sure that you select the right category for your campaign. Sometimes picking the wrong category or having too much categories can kill your campaign.

[Raydal]

Originally Posted by cjmo75

It's funny. I just posted my first SU ad yesterday. I'm still waiting for it to be approved, however. It does look like an effective and cheap way to drive traffic. However, I was under the impression it was 5 cents per click. How do you lower the price?

I think he is averaging the cost from the "organic" visitors with the
paid visitors to get that lower number. So all the clicks from SU
would not be from the paid ads.

-Ray Edwards

[Deepak Media]

Originally Posted by cjmo75

It's funny. I just posted my first SU ad yesterday. I'm still waiting for it to be approved, however. It does look like an effective and cheap way to drive traffic. However, I was under the impression it was 5 cents per click. How do you lower the price?

The whole point of advertising in stumbleupon is to give an initial boost to your content and then letting it on its own to either die or create a snowball effect - that depends on whether the SU users like your content or not.

Entertainment stuff works well and information stuff works somewhat well. Try to sell something directly and they will kill your campaign with a shower of "thumbs downs"

[ichuck]

I'm considering using StumbleUpon Ads to kickstart an infographic I just created. I've heard that it can help increase social media shares and I'm guessing that if enough visitors give it a thumbs up it will earn some free Stumbleupon traffic. I just signed up and it is quoting me 10 cents per click so the price may have been increased.

[RyanLeonard]

Awesome info OP. I haven't looked into SU ads, but may have to now... Now, what to promote..

Would you think promoting kindle ebooks would work, or would that be too much direct selling?