You may not even have realised that Stumbleupon.com offer an advertising option,

I didn’t until last week, when I found out thanks to Yaro Stark.

obviously I needed to go and have a play to see whether it’s an undiscovered gem of traffic, or not…

You can listen to my thoughts about the results I received on the short podcast below, it’s less than 4 minutes long, so you shouldn’t fall asleep..

But I’ll give a quick written summary of my results as well.

first it’s worth noting that you’re not paying for “ad displays” or even clicks on ads, you’re paying for actual visitors to your site, as your site is added to the selection of sites in your chosen category that are presented to Stumbleupon users to “stumble” and vote on

second it’s only $0.05 per visitor, which if you can get properly “targeted” visitors through your selection of category for your campaign, could be very cheap traffic..

I decided to give it a try with my BlogTactics.com blog.

there’s no real tracking built in, so you’re reliant upon whatever tracking you have built in to your site.

as you can choose different categories for you site to appear in within stumbleupn, I decided to run a campaign for 2 days for each of three different categories to see which preformed the best, my aim was to get people to sign up for my newsletter.

my results?

over 6 days I received over 1,500 visitors for a cost of $75

this traffic resulted in an extra 8 signups each day (on average), giving me a toal of 48 new subscribers that “probably” came from Stumbleupon (I’ve no way of being certain that they were however), which gives a cost of roughly $1.5 per new signup.

I then checked my stats in aweber to see how many of those new “optins” had actually confirmed their subscriptions and discovered it was under 50%, so in fact the “Real” cost per new confirmed signup is over $3, which is not great to say the least..

I suspect this is partly because the traffic is not targted well enough, and possibly also because web 2.0 social bookmarking site users don’t tend to like “internet/affiliate marketing” style sites on the whole.

I believe it will be possible to do better with the Stumbleupon ads in non-”IM” markets, so that’s what I’ll be testing next week…

If you want to stay up to date with the results just sign up for the newsletter or the RSS feed in the sidebar on the right.

thanks and here’s the audio: -

and here’s the link for the ads

Stumbleupon Ads

Tags: web 2.0

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