Case study : My StumbleUpon advertising campaign

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Last week I ended up with a small amount of money through affiliate sales and as soon as did I decided to reinvest it to grow my blog. I always wanted to buy a StumbleUpon advertising campaign as most of my friends had told me about the success they had with it. StumbleUpon gives a rate of $0.5 per view which is a bit more expensive than Adwords, but unlike Adwords stumbleupon helps spread your blog virally which brings constant traffic even after your campaign ends.

The campaign isn’t very expensive, you can get upto 100 views with just $5 and as I’m a kid with a small budget I’m always up for small opportunities to extend my blogs reach. I always keep looking for new ways to drive traffic and at times I don’t mind spending a small amount. Stumble Upon advertising has proven to be very effective and that $5 has provided me with more than a 1000 visitors, before I can tell me experiences and solutions for a successful campaign, I would like to give a brief introduction of Stumble Upon.

What is StumbleUpon?

StumbleUpon is a growing social bookmarking site which is being used by millions across the world. Recently, many bloggers and internet marketers have found out about its high traffic potential which has got it saturated. StumbleUpon is not a normal social bookmarking site, its when a person submits a page and many people would rate it, the more positive reviews it gets, more are the people who get to see it, but getting the first positive reviews is very tough. To get your webpages viewed you can use the StumbleUpon advertising which shows targeted users your page.

The reason I like StumbleUpon Advertising is because its pretty cheap, it allows you to target the exact category, age, location and gender, so you can be sure that your pages are only viewed by the people who are interested in your niche. StumbleUpon gives enough flexibility on adding funds and maintaining your daily expenditure, you can transfer money using PayPal or by credit card.

StumbleUpon generates a report on your sites performance, this report gives detailed info on the number of people who saw your site, the number of people who like it and the number of people who disliked it. Other than your site’s analytics, this report should tell you your campaign’s status.

Making your campaign effective

StumbleUpon’s effectiveness changes according to your niche, one type of niche might have great success and the other might fail, this post provides advise according to my experience,

Reducing your bounce rate

The day after I activated my campaign the first thing I saw in the morning was a high bounce rate of 60%, which was usually around 30% to 40%. I knew that StumbleUpon users were very frickle, but I didn’t care to optimize my site for that. I quickly paused my campaign and started to optimize my blog for reducing my bounce rate. First of all I put up related posts, sponsored posts and recent posts sections in my site, then I activated my WP Greet box for StumbleUpon users, I started to interlink my posts with my posts which were advertised. The next day when I checked my stats my bounce rate was 52%, not a major difference as my bounce rate was still high. I guess it was a problem with my niche, or else I’m sure the above methods would help you reduce your bounce rate. Another thing I observed was that games and videos which are stumbled always have a low bounce rate, so the key is to engage your users.

Make your readers subscribe

I say this is your main goal, to get as many loyal subscribers as possible. I succeeded in this as my subscriber level almost doubled during my campaign, but it fell by 50% from there after the campaign. I used that WP Greet Box which encouraged visitors to subscribe to my feed. Another technique I used was to give away a free e-book for subscribers, I think this was the main reason my subscriber level went so high, and when most of the users had got my ebook they decided to unsubscribe.

Use image and video posts instead of articles

I had advertised 3 articles (the worlds biggest photoshop mistakes, 30 Richest Internet Entrepreneurs and Imperial Monetization methods for your blog) in one week and all of them performed well, but the the best performing ones were ‘The worlds biggest photoshop mistakes‘ and ‘Top 30 richest internet entrepreneurs‘, the reason was that these two posts had more of images which StumbleUpon users love to see, other articles do perform well, but not as good as the articles which post only images and videos. Such posts also help you decrease your bounce rate and may lead to some conversions.

Spread across other social platforms

Even after my campaign was over I still kept getting constant traffic from StumbleUpon, but that campaign also helped me get traffic from Digg, Twitter and Sphinn, because I had put up many social bookmarking buttons on each of those posts. All the three got upto 17 to 20 retweets, 5 to 10 diggs and sphinns. This works well as most of the StumbleUpon users will have a presence on many other popular social sites, so its well and good to leverage traffic from all those sites. This is how internet marketing works, you use limited sources of traffic to extend your reach.

Stumble has the highest potential to send your blog viral, many bloggers keep claiming that one campaign has lead to many diggs and retweets, which then leads to thousands of visitors. The main of your campaign should be to trigger a viral chain, this can be done only if you optimize your landing page effectively.

Monetization

Another question bloggers usually have is how do they monetize their StumbleUpon traffic, you can’t do it in the way you do it for other sources, because StumbleUpon users are frickle, which leads to very less conversions. On the day of my ad campaign, my Adsense  CTR almost touched rock bottom. I think its well and good if you use CPM ad networks which are always filled. It doesn’t matter if the CPMs are low, just try to make the best of your traffic.

Put up banner ads in between your posts, but make sure your not spoiling your sites real estate or making it very slow. You cannot expect to get back your entire investment through this, unless you trigger a viral chain leading to continous and ongoing traffic.