Stumbleupon Ad, Does it Work?
Posted on August 25, 2010 by Amit
Not many affiliate marketers know about the StumbleUpon Ad network.
StumbleUpon has a Cost Per View ad network where you can buy an ad for a certain number impressions
And it works much differently from other ppc, contextual, ppv ad networks.
First there is no ads to create as you may be used to as in Google Adwords. You create a campaign starting with the url of your landing page which can be your home page url too.
Then choose your target demography. StumbleUpon allows you to target by coutry, state, city, age group, and age group. Plus you can choose up to ten sub categories under a few major categories like. For instance under the major category Commerce, you can choose Bargain/coupons, Ecommerce, Shopping. Based on your choice, your ad(web page) will be shown to stumblers who has listed these categories as their interests.
Once you create the campaign, fund your account and your campaign is approved, StumpleUpon will show your page, yes the entire page, to stumblers. Each time your page is shown to a stumbler it costs you 5¢.
Who are the stumblers
Stumblers are persons like you and me who have signed up with Stumbleupon and have listed their interest areas (like shopping, travelling, computers etc) and also have provided their demographics (age, sex, country, city etc). When a stumbler signs in to StumbleUpon and stumble (yes, there is an actual button named ‘Stumble’), a variety of webpages are shown to the user based on their interests. Some of the websites that are shown are the paid sites from the Stumbleupon ad campaigns.
A stumbler has the ability to ‘like’ your page or ‘not like’ your page using the thumb up and thumb down buttons or they can simply browse your site if they find something interesting or hit the ‘stumble’ button again, in which case another random paid or unpaid page will be shown to them.
Cost
It costs 5¢ per view. So if you put $5 in a cmapaign, your page will be shown 100 times. One view is one dispaly of your page and doesn’t require any user action. Whether the user performs any action while on your page, you incur the cost.
Does StumbleUpon Ads Work
It has its shortcomings like any contextual ads, where an ad is shown to a user when the user isn’t really searching for anything particular.
A stumbler isn’t really searching for anything. He or she may just be killing time on the computer because facebook is down or twitter is over capacity. So stumblers have very short attention spann. A stumbler may not stay on your page long enough to like or dislike it or perform any action that may benefit you.
But what makes Stumbleupon ads less attractive is its cost which is higher than any other CPM ads.
It may work for big guys in their branding efforts. But in an affiliate marketing context, where ROI drives all ppc/cpc/cpm campaigns success or failure, Stumbleupon Ads won’t deliver the goods.
Bottom Line
My philosophy is you should try every legitimate avenues of advertising and see if it has any potential and decide for yourself. Don’t put a lot of emphasis on people like me who may tell you what works and what doesn’t. Try it yourself first.
If you have something that has spread well virally and has worked in the past, you may want to give it a try. Put $5 down in a StumbleUpon campaign and run it to completion. Then once its over come back tell me about how it went.
Last but not the least, if you don’t mind will please stumble this post.
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