Recently, I had the opportunity to test out StumbleUpon.com’s advertising platform for a project I was working on. I was skeptical at first, because when you sign up for a StumbleUpon account it states that each visit will only cost $0.05. I was previously unaware of many places where you could buy traffic for that cheap.

What is StumbleUpon? As you may know, StumbleUpon is a tool that allows people to discover great web pages that match their interests and hobbies. You can click a Stumble button on your browser, and StumbleUpon will open up a web page that should be relevant and new to you. You then tell it whether or not you like that particular page. With millions of web pages on the internet, StumbleUpon aims to make it easier for you to discover new sites that are relevant to you. Tour StumbleUpon Advertising.

Create a Campaign: I would like to focus more on the results of my campaign, so in the interest of saving time, here is a link to promote your page with StumbleUpon. A few pointers when setting up a campaign: I recommend appending a source code to your page URL, so you can track the results more easily with your analytics package. A source code looks like this: http://yoursite.com/?source=1234. I also recommend using the Advanced Options when setting up the campaign. This will allow you to filter your campaign to be displayed to stumblers based on geographic region, age, and gender.

Campaign Results:

Unique campaigns – 4

Campaign duration – 12 days

Campaign budget – $1,014

Total visits – 20,413

Cost per visit – $0.049

Results from one of the four campaigns

Conclusion: After looking at the results, I was pleased to see that StumbleUpon delivered traffic for $0.05 per visitor. Another bonus was that once the campaign was over, I was still seeing a significant amount of traffic from those links used in the campaign. If you include the extra traffic, you could say that the cost per visitor was considerably less than $0.05.

I could only find two drawbacks with this ad platform. One, my bounce rate went up quite a bit. This is due to the nature of StumbleUpon. Stumblers typically land on your page, take a quick glance, and then leave. Two, I had to add new campaigns every once in a while. It seems like campaigns can become stale.

Overall, I would highly recommend StumbleUpon Advertising to young web sites looking to get quick cheap traffic. Have you used StumbleUpon Advertising before? I am interested in hearing what your experiences were.

BilBraur.com