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StumbleAds is the paid advertisement section of the free Stumbleupon toolbar. I have always received ample amounts of free traffic from the use and abuse Stumbleupon technique, but I have never tested the paid version until now. I decided to do a $60 test run to see what kind of results I would get and report them here.
StumbleAds charges a set price of 5 cents per unique visitor that comes to your site. This is a great price because the visitors are selected from the niche you relate to. I put the $60 test run to my WordHugger site to see if getting 1200 targeted visitors I would be able to sell one page and make my money back. In my past experience, I have around a 1% purchase rate (for every 100 visitors, one buys a word at $60) so by this statistic I should sell 12 pages and earn $720 revenue. I assumed I might even get lucky and sell more because rather than having 100 unrelated visitors, I would have 100 targeted (”Investing” niche) visitors who would be more inclined to buy something in their interest. If some of the 1200 visitors didn’t even buy a page but enjoyed the site, they could Stumble the site themselves sending even more traffic and customers to my site.
I was wrong… big time, and although I can’t prove it, it appears the system may have scammed me. The $60 budget was supposed to send 300 visitors (more if some of them stumbled the site) per day, but my Google Analytics shows 281, 249, 237, and 268 which means I paid for 165 visitors that I did not receive. The visitors only stayed on my site for an average of 29 seconds when the sitewide average is 2 1/2 minutes. I did not receive a single sale and no feedback from the visitors. For all I know, StumbleAds sent a few hundred robots to sit on my page for a few seconds and then close the window.
Well, it looks like I am not the only one who has had a bad experience with the Stumbleupon Paid Advertising Experience, so it looks like I will go back to using and abusing the website, but moving my paid advertising budget somewhere else.
I had pretty similar results that I wrote about on my site. I don’t think I, or you for that matter, were scammed though. I think it just further proves that StumbleUpon traffic isn’t all that great whether or not you pay for it.
Hey Collin,
I used Stumbleupon.com for my past work, http://bedzine.com and received the same results. Zero sales for $500 of advertising. But you can’t blame it on StumbleUpon. They simply don’t have the “concentrated” audience you need for your product.
I have, however, created a new site called http://sitehoppin.com that you can promote your new sites.
Basically it’s a del.ici.ous and Stumbleupon.com mashed up together, it’s still in works but you can use it while we develop the technology. We are trying to aim for Web 2.5 where you combine the best technologies and make something new.
It was not only you…even i had a bad experience with it..LOL but i spent only $10 for it though….All the visitors were untargeted and as you said they were like robots…Lets see if someone says our reference is wrong
The same thing happened to me. I’m not sure how they calculate that you pay for a certain amount of visitors yet deliver less than promised.
You should email this post to Stumble and let them know what people are saying about their Stumble paid advertising experience.
Stumble is better for promoting than it is for sales for sure.
Google analytics will often miss a decent number of hits because it doesn’t account for people running script blocking plugins.
You might have been better off buying stumbles at that rate, and setting up cpm ads so that you get money regardless of if they click anything.
Well the verdict is a definate no go for stumbleupon
then!
Sally