

Ask HN: Efficiency of StumbleUpon advertising ? - huhtenberg

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 <i>not</i> work.<p>Does anyone has an experience with them ?<p>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 <i>is</i> something to look at) ?<p>Thanks
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patio11
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.)

~~~
swombat
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.

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jreposa
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.

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bemmu
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.

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zealog
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. :)

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jusob
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 :-(

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pierrefar
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.

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

