Last week I posted about advertising on Facebook, and promised, that this week we’ll get back to the paid marketing topic and talk about StumbleUpon. This site is a really great and easy to use site. After registrating, you can either stumble for websites, posts, or pictures that you like (and you can specify your interests, to only stumble upon the sites you like), or you can start a campaign.
Now last week a new system started on StumbleUpon in advertising: there are three different categories, and three different type of payment plans. But I’ll talk about this later, first I’ll share my experience doing marketing. When I started I had to pay 5 cents per stumble, or I lets say: per impression. Immediately you can see that this is better than Facebook Ads. There you had impressions for your ad, not for your site! Your ad can be small, badly created, not attractive enough, there can be a lot of problem with it, and you have to pay 20 cents for a 1000 impression, and maybe nobody will click for the actual site (which can be much more attractive visually, because it is bigger). So you have to pay 5 cent per view, but this isn’t going to guarantee, that people will stay on your site (but your chances are better).
You can also specify your budget. Last time I mentioned a $100 budget. Keeping this in mind you can advertise yourself to 60 people a day, and pay 3 dollars for this (and at the end of the month you spent roughly 90 dollars). This is a huge difference between Facebook and StumbleUpon! With 3 dollars on facebook you can show 3 people your site and it won’t even guarantee that they will stay for much longer. So if you have a small business, and you don’t have any specification for your business, that can be advertised successfully on Facebook, I definately recommend advertising on StumbleUpon. This applies for example to those who have blogs, or they are architectures, designers, etc.
And that 60 people is guaranteed (and if not, you won’t have to pay that much). Well this is great, you could say, but what about actual views? Because these are just impressions! And yes, not all 60 people will stay and watch your site if it’s not that great, or it is just starting out (so it doesn’t have much content). In my estimates, every 10th person will stumble a little more on your site. So you could say, that you have to pay approximately 50 cents for one somewhat engaged view. If we project this onto the statistics I gained from Facebook ads, we see, that there I spent more than $10-15 for an engaged click (because most of them just clicked away instantly, and only 1-2 person liked the facebook page and a few searched around in the blog).
But the number on StumbleUpon is continuously improving, though still slowly. The good thing about this is that after setting up a campaign and defining a monthly and daily budget, you really don’t have to do anything, and in a month it will guarantee you more or less 180 engaged views for only 90 dollars. This is the best paid strategy I found, but it’s still not as good as direct e-mail marketing (which is completely free, but it requires much more effort put into it).
At the end, I just want to add a little bit about the different price ranges, that you can select. Theres a light plan (5 cents), a standard plan (10 cents), and a premium plan (for 25 cents per impression). When these options showed up, I tried the standard plan for a day, because it seemed a better deal: I payed 5 cents per visitors, so I had 60 visitors a day, but the standard plan said, I will only have to pay after engaged visitors, so I had approximately 6 engaged visitors a day before (engaged visitor for me, who doesn’t have a 100% bounce rate on google analytics and stays more than 0 seconds). So with this I could have 30 engaged visitor a day, and pay the same price. So it is five times better, right? Well no. At least it wasn’t for me.
The statistics didn’t change a bit, everything was the same, so I was practically ripped of a few dollars with this tactic. maybe it guaranteed, that my blog showed up more often than before, but I had to pay double, and I didn’t have more engaged visitors, which is my goal obviously. I have to add, that I didn’t integrated stumble upon with google analytics, so maybe there was a problem, but I don’t think that this is necessary or good for a small company. The standard and premium plans are for big sites, who can afford the money, so their sites will be stumbled upon more.
