My Experience With Stumbleupon Ads

A little while ago I wrote a post about how to use Stumbleupon. In a very short time Stumbleupon has become one of my top referrals for traffic on my blog. This is in part due to adding pages. But I have also begun using Paid Discovery, essentially advertising my blog on StumbleUpon.

Paid Discovery is separate from StumbleUpon so if you already have a SU account you need to make another. Creating a campaign is very similar to the process of adding a page on the regular SU. First you choose a page to promote, then you choose who you want to see the page.

Normally I narrow down the location, having users from the UK and US seems to work best. Then you just need to choose what topics the page fits in. I’ve found you have a wider choice on this page compared to the free SU. And there are preset topics available too.

BENEFITS OF PAID DISCOVERY

Paid discover works exactly like the regular version of Stumbleupon. In the free version you add pages to certain topics. If other SU users like that page it gets viewed by more users. Stumbleupon PD simply means your page is viewed by a certain number of people. But it still gets added to the same database. This means your page will continue to get views after your campaign has ended.

I’ve been using paid discovery since August and currently out of all the stumbles my pages have gained, half have been from the paid campaign, the other have have come from natural views. This basically means so long as people ‘like’ your post. It is almost guaranteed your page will continue to get traffic from Stumbleupon. In terms of steady traffic I’ve found the paid version is more reliable than the free one.

DISADVANTAGES OF STUMBLEUPON ADS

While you are guaranteed to get traffic from SU paid discovery, those users aren’t likely to browse your blog. In fact they might not spend much time on it at all. You need to think about bounce rates and the amount of time users spend on your blog. Users coming from StumbleUpon can affect these stats. They *might* read your post, they might also continue browsing through SU without reading your post at all.

Like I said on my previous post. You need to think carefully if that is the sort of traffic you want. Yes increased viewers will make your stats look better. But a high bounce rate can affect your SEO.

FINALLY

The thing I’ve found with Stumbleupon is it’s quite easy to create a post which users will like. Simply creating something ‘useful’ means you have a good chance of getting likes and therefor traffic to your blog. This is mostly down to the fact there are lots ‘bad’ pages on SU too. If you’ve written something that people might find useful then go ahead and it.

Whether you actually want to spend your money advertising on StumbleUpon is another matter. I imagine there will be someone out there who considers it a form of cheating. By paying money you are guaranteed traffic but there is no point gaining traffic if those users don’t come back to your blog. It’s really depends on what you want from Stumbleupon. If you have an advertising budget then maybe spend some on SU. Then again you may be better off spending your money on Facebook.